Capacity building for trade impact assessment: lessons from the development of environmental impact assessment

Public Participation in the EU’s Sustainability Impact Assessments of Trade Agreements

“…This might be undermined by overly close cooperation with trading partners on SIAs (European Commission 2002c). One way to avoid these problems would be for every country taking part in the negotiations or likely to be affected by their outcomes to undertake its own impact assessment to inform its negotiating position (George, Nafti and Curran 2001). Since most mitigating measures will require national policy measures, national SIAs could have practical advantages for implementation.…”

Environmental capacity-building in a transitional economy: the emergence of EIA capacity in Viet Nam

“…This will not only assist in the design of more positive governmental development policies, but will help the country to understand and address existing and future 'strategic-level' decisions affecting the environment, including trade agreements (George et al, 2001), international conventions, and multilateral environmental agreements.…”

Sustainability appraisal: jack of all trades, master of none?

“…Although themes 2 to 7 might be regarded as capacity-building issues that would be common to the introduction of any new decision-making tool (see, for example, George et al, 2001;Cherp and Golubeva, 2004), the delivery of sustainable outcomes was a theme included because of evidence that SA did not always achieve this (Benson and Jordan, 2004;Land Use Consultants and The Royal Town Planning Institute, 2008). One explanation for this could be that the tool is simply not working well enough, and that capacity building will resolve this.…”