Systematic Map of the Social Impact Assessment Field

Abstract

Social impact assessment (SIA) provides a methodology for defining, monitoring and employing measures to demonstrate the benefits and/or harms created for target communities through evidence of social outcomes and impacts. Although a recent increase in the number of applications is seen, SIA lacks consensus in its methodology, which increases ambiguity and complicates the generalization of any results obtained from individual studies. The objectives of this study are to investigate the methodology of SIA in order to define trends, state of the art, limitations, knowledge gaps, and to recommend future research directions. This study employs a systematic mapping to determine the methods available to perform SIA, and more importantly to identify a set of fundamental challenges faced by practitioners using SIA. Articles are searched through online databases, and are limited to the English language. A total of 81 articles published between 2009 and 2019 were selected, of which 49 included a case study application. A total of 12 fundamental challenges were identified, based upon the screened articles, which serve as a starting point for future research directions to further enhance the SIA methodology.