The importance of utilizing social impact assessments as a tool to support future development should be highlighted.

The issue of utilizing such studies has been pointed out in the past, and while they are used to some extent in Malta today, their use can be more widespread.

The Malta Independent on Sunday recently spoke to an expert in the field, Frank Vanclay, Professor of Social Impact Assessment and Management at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands who was a guest of the Department of Sociology at the University of Malta.

He explains that Social Impact Assessments enable planners, policymakers, and regulators to make more informed decisions and avoid causing harm. 

Michael Briguglio, an associate professor of Sociology at the University of Malta, gave a brief outline of the use of such assessments in Malta, saying that they are not as systematically embedded in legislation as Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs), but references to social aspects and community consultation appear across various laws, policies, and regulatory frameworks. "These include Regional Councils, where they must carry out social impact evaluations within the first year of each legislature, the Planning Authority's tall buildings policy (otherwise it is discretionary in the rest of planning), and Malta Post-Pandemic Strategy (2021) - though it does not seem that this was followed up."

But given the benefits that such assessments can bring, they should be widely used. "All projects have the potential to create harm as well as good. The idea is to reduce the potential for harm and to ensure that benefits are created", Professor Vanclay said. Speaking about construction development projects in particular, he said that engineers don't necessarily think about things in social terms, "so harm could be created just because they don't comprehend how people could be negatively affected by a project. Social impact assessments have many benefits. One of them is to help in making better decisions in terms of what should or shouldn't be approved".

Ensuring that projects don't negatively impact communities should be a priority. Conducting social impact assessments to predict what impacts a project will have on neighbours, citizens of the locality etc. would help planners decide whether a project should be approved or not, or what mitigating factors could be implemented to help reduce or prevent the negative impacts of that project. In addition to this, such assessments should also be continuous exercises. While prediction is one element, viewing the impacts on the community through the ongoing process of development, or operation of that project, could help identify issues which in turn could lead to finding solutions.  "At decision phase, for instance, you need a report to take an informed decision. But then in terms of the ongoing management of a project, it should be a continuous process. The assessment interacts with community engagement actions that projects may have," Vanclay says.

Community engagement in such assessments and in possibly finding solutions is important, and might have prevented some negative impacts of development that the country is experiencing today.

The use of Social Impact Assessments should not just be limited to the planning sector.

When it comes to policies and strategies for instance, such assessments could also be useful, especially in terms of ensuring that the intended outcomes are successful. Some elements of public engagement over impacts are already seen today, such as through public consultations, but the process can be improved.

In general, one must stress the importance of community engagement in such assessments, and that people's comments in them are heard and not ignored.