The importance of process in social impact assessment: Ethics, methods and process for cross-cultural engagement

Social impact assessment (SIA) presents an important opportunity to draw cross-cultural encounters arising from project-based development efforts into wider procedures of engagement and negotiation that might address the imbalance in relationships between local communities, project proponents and states. In the SIA literature, however, ethical considerations have received relatively little explicit attention, with greater attention given to outcomes in the form of negotiated agreements and financial and employment results. This paper considers the question of SIA methods from the standpoint of recent Australian national guidelines on ethical engagement with Australian Indigenous people, and argues for much greater attention being given to process and its implications for just and sustainable outcomes in SIA research.