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The construction of social differences - A reflection on the social relations and development approach

This article seeks to reflect upon the dominant conception of social impacts as the change produced by development projects and programs, and the ways in which those affected perceive and experience them. Identifying change may be a necessary but not sufficient step in acknowledging the complexity of social life. Engaging with critical scholarship produced in the fields of both social impact assessment (SIA) and of the social studies of technical/planned interventions, I discuss how the understanding of social impacts as change responds ultimately to a causal–instrumental logic that, in order to make sense of the complexity of social life, tends to reduce it to a series of variables and matrices. I suggest a complementary dialectical approach focusing on social relations. This approach, allows an alternative means of analyzing social impacts concerning the way policies and projects reconfigure conditions and possibilities on a societal level. To accomplish this, and in order to go beyond the sequence of potential impacts (or changes) and their generic indicators, I propose a set of analytical questions that highlight how social relations are structured. Besides, on the assumption that development is both a form of governance and a space of contestation, negotiation, and activism, this approach may contribute to further the potential for reflection and mobilization that the practice of SIA presents.

In this article, I seek to present a reflection on the dominant conception of ‘social impact’ as the changes ‘that affect people’ (Van clay et al., 2015: 2) brought about by development interventions, and to propose that while identifying a broad range of changes may be a necessary step to identifying the social significance of planned interventions, it may not be sufficient to account for the complexity of social life.

This reflection stems from the acknowledgement that, even if social impact assessment (SIA) has become a recognized field of practice ‘with a legitimate mandate’ (Estevez et al., 2012: 38), and notwithstanding the growing corpus of works advocating and proposing more political and critical approaches to SIA (Freudenberg, 1986, Craig, 1990, O'Faircheallaigh, 2009, Estevez et al., 2012, Morrison-Saunders et al., 2015, among others), there is a tendency in the planning and execution of development and economic projects to carry out poor social impact assessments and, sometimes, to ignore them altogether (Van clay, 1999, Van clay, 2002a, Van clay, 2002b, [IFC] International Finance Corporation, 2009, Pope et al., 2013, Van clay et al., 2015, Morrison-Saunders et al., 2015, Bice, 2015).

What I intend to argue here is that this situation derives in part from the fact that the definition of impacts advanced in the general field of impact assessment (as the changes produced by development projects), has been extrapolated and applied to social life ignoring some of the basic traits of social phenomena, as has been observed by Franks et al., 2010, Franks et al., 2011, Freudenberg (1986), and Craig (1990) among others. Furthermore, the application of this generic definition of impacts to the social world has had important social consequences in itself, since it has contributed, by reducing its analytical scope, to the ‘depoliticizing’ (Ferguson, 1994) of the projects and interventions under study.

This probably explains why, even when SIA exercises are performed following the safeguard measures and other recommendations established by development institutions and agencies (or indeed because of this1), projects do not necessarily reach the larger social objectives they set and frequently encounter unforeseen contradictory effects. Development and its specific interventions (policies, plans, and projects: PPP2), remain a minefield — as evidenced by the numerous and on-going conflicts triggered by socio-environmental issues in the target countries for development — and are, in many cases, a determining factor in the impoverishment and subordination of their recipients (cf. Mitchell, 2011, Tsing, 2005, Greenough and Tsing, 2003, Miller and Rose, 2008; among many others). And sometines, they give rise to explosive situations where those who are the purported beneficiaries of the projects actually consider themselves more as ‘affected parties’ or even as their victims (Serje, 2010, Jaramillo, 2012). This is, no doubt, related to the fact that social impacts are either ignored or not properly identified. It might also have something to do with the fact that the tools currently used to identify social impacts are limited in scope and may overlook many social trends, practices, and emergent processes.

Identifying social impacts appropriately is of crucial importance since, as Pope et al. (2013, p.6) suggest, the management of ‘non-technical risks has recently become a hot topic’. It has been recognised that in order to adequately address the socio-environmental conflicts associated with development projects, SIA must go beyond the instrumental scope of the PPP in order to assess their effects in a broader societal context and in this way, transcend the purpose of influencing decision-making within development goals, and contribute to the creation of social possibilities for equity and sustainability, particularly so where indigenous groups are concerned (Freudenburg, 1986, Craig, 1990, Nish and Bice, 2011, Hanna et al., 2016, among others).

My intention here is not to discuss SIA practice, but to explore the current definition of social impacts conceptually. In what follows, I will present a reflection on the way in which social impacts are defined in what may be considered the ‘mainstream’ SIA operational literature (put forth by institutions such as the IAIA and adopted by corporations and international development agencies) and argue why this definition may be seen as limited. To broaden the analytical scope for social impacts, I will propose a complementary route of analysis, centred on social relations. Thus, in Section 2, I discuss the mainstream concept of social impacts, which refers to the changes (however they are defined or qualified) produced by planned interventions. I will then discuss the idea of social change from an anthropological perspective, examining the assumptions upon which this particular notion of social impacts is based, in order to investigate whether conceptualising social impacts as change in itself or as the experience of such change is a sufficient approach to understand them.

In the third section, this paper builds on scholarship within SIA literature (on the dilemma between its ‘political’ and ‘technical’ or instrumental dimension), and within the social sciences (on the politics and instrumentality of social interventions) that shed light on key issues to rethink social impacts. These discussions have opened new perspectives by placing the problem of causality in social life at the centre of the debate and by focusing on social relations (that is, the relationship between the social roles, hierarchies, and categories through which individuals and groups interact). An important insight to be drawn from these studies is that, in order to account for the complexity of social life, we need to recognise the emergent character of social phenomena and analyse social relations dialectically. Subsequently, in the fourth section, I discuss the relevance of the analysis of social relations to identify and evaluate social impacts and the challenges they pose, and I propose a set of questions as a guide for this kind of analysis.

Following the definition of impacts in general, social impacts have been broadly conceptualised as the change in the human environment brought about by certain actions or events. Social impact assessments have focused, accordingly, on the various aspects that are described as social change. The current definition of social impacts, adopted officially by the IAIA (Vanclay et al., 2015) and put forward by influential international development agencies such as the World Bank (2014), IFC (n.d.),

The concept of ‘impact’ is used with an implicit causal logic (inasmuch as PPP are seen as ‘the cause’ and impacts are understood as ‘effects’ or ‘consequences’), probably due to the fact that development interventions in general rest on similar assumptions (Scott, 1998, Rabinow, 2003, Rose, 2004, Miller and Rose, 2008). Development and planning as a field of knowledge and social practice are essentially prescriptive. They are understood as ‘a set of procedures and political forms that are to

Human responses and reactions are complex not only because they are mediated by the different dimensions of the mind, but also because they are social phenomena and thus respond to the distinctive forms of organisation and experience in any society. Social phenomena share a crucial feature that requires rethinking the logic of causality when applied to human action: the fact that they shape and, at the same time, are shaped by social relations.

Evaluate the article
In this article, I have discussed the conceptual problems presented by the current definition of social impacts as changes and the way they are experienced. I have pointed out that this way of seeing impacts is redundant, in the sense that it hardly provides relevant elements for the analysis as it can lead to extremely vague generalisations, such as the one stated in the impact assessment guide recently published by the IAIA (Vanclay et al., 2015).