On 3 May 2019, the UN secretary general António Guterres, tweeted: “No democracy is complete without access to transparent and reliable information. On #WorldPressFreedomDay, we must all defend the rights of journalists, whose efforts help us build a better world for all.” How can we see to it that Guterres someday soon also will promote environmental assessment - on #FreePlanningDay? https://doi.org/10.1080/14615517.2019.1665947

Over the course of 2019, and despite being located in a region marked by violent conflict, the Inter collectivité du Sourou achieved a unique feat in the West African region.1 It developed an Integrated and Sustainable Development Programme (ISDP) that defined concrete actions to implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the Sourou river plain in Mali in an adaptive fashion and set itself up as the main coordinator for the implementation of this plan. Both achievements will help the region coordinate natural resource management – thereby addressing one of the region’s root causes of conflict. This policy brief outlines how the effective devolution of power was achieved through an inclusive rather than a ‘rubber stamp’ approach to the planning process and by having a donor that made the improvement of local governance a result of its own intrinsic value. For the long-term implementation of the ISDP, care should be taken to ensure the continued inclusivity and repres

Conclusions of a webinar on 3 june 2020, where the chairs of inter-ministerial committees from Senegal, Guinea and Mali explained how they integrated knowledge into their planning process. Cases related to water management, land use, offshore oil and gas development, hydropower, bauxite mining and Chimpansee protection. In each of these cases, a procedure for environmental and social assessment was applied.

The case describes how local people in Mali’s Sourou area create a new future for themselves despite huge uncertainty. Water management, a national responsibility, is one key to economic development, but it failed in the past due to neglect. This can be considered a chicken-egg problem. In 2018 and 2019, the Inter Collectivité of the Sourou (mayors and various social-economic groups) jointly created what they called an integrated and sustainable development programme and lobbied for donor assistance to implement their plan. The plan is adaptive to future decisions on water management, which would enable investments. For the first time in Mali, a development plan of high quality was made by a local population and approved by the state. The water authority has started developing its management plan.

Paper presented at IAIA conference, April 2017 in Montreal. Practices of the Dutch ministry of Foreign Affairs are described to mainstream climate change mitigation and adaptation objectives into multilateral and bilateral official development assistance programmes.

Paper presented at IAIA conference, April 2017 in Montreal. Practices of the Dutch ministry of Foreign Affairs are described to mainstream climate change mitigation and adaptation objectives into multilateral and bilateral official development assistance programmes.

In: Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 30 (2), 127-135. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2009.05.007

The author assumes that effective Impact Assessment procedures should somehow contribute to sustainable development. There is no widely agreed framework for evaluating such effectiveness. The author suggests that complexity theories may offer criteria. The relevant question is ‘do Impact Assessment Procedures contribute to the “requisite variety” of a social system for it to deal with changing circumstances? ‘Requisite variety theoretically relates to the capability of a system to deal with changes in its environment. The author reconstructs how thinking about achieving sustainable development has developed in a sequence of discourses in The Netherlands since the 1970s. Each new discourse built on the previous ones, and is supposed to have added to ‘requisite variety’. The author asserts that Impact Assessment procedures may be a necessary component in such sequences and derives possible criteria for effectiveness.

Y. Deelstra, S.G. Nooteboom; H.R. Kohlmann; J. van den Berg; S. Innanen. The connection between the world of knowledge and the world of decisionmaking should be carefully constructed, by connecting the process of decision-making to the academic research and carefully developing research goals in response to the demands of decision-makers. By making these connections in a stepwise manner, knowledge may generate new insights and views for involved decision-makers and stakeholders, thus changing perceptions and problem definitions. In: EIA Review (23) : 5 pp 517-541