ABSTRACT
With the exception of ecological impacts, most impacts are assessed by the repercussions they have on humans (noise, air pollution, landscape, etc.) and to that extent they all could be considered social in nature. However, impacts usually referred to as “socio-economic” have the characteristic that they are transmitted through the workings of society itself, its economy and the behaviour of its population as a result of the project. In this respect, traffic impacts can also be considered under the same heading, as they also result directly from social behaviour – with vehicles as “instruments”. This view of socio-economic impacts suggests the need to consider how society works in order to assess any impacts on it, and that can face us with a problem similar to what we found when dealing with ecology, i.e. the extreme complexity of the science that studies the field, in this case, social behaviour. It can be argued (Vanclay, 1999) that social impacts have always been the central concern of the social sciences, and that to analyse these impacts we have to use the rigour of such sciences. In this sense, the usual approach to the study of these impacts can be said to only “scratch the surface” of social impacts, concentrating on relatively superficial indicators of impact but without getting into their deeper social repercussions in terms of social change, the true measure of social impact. On the other hand, in practical terms it might prove difficult to engage in deep social research involving wide-ranging surveys for every project requiring this type of impact assessment. This is one of the dilemmas of socio-economic impact assessment – and one that impact studies address in varying degrees – especially since this area of impact assessment is relatively new and still has to become fully established as part of the standard collection of impacts to consider.
