Natalia Taksami SIA in resource management: theoretical approach and instrument of policy making

While Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) became a common practice on a daily basis around the world, the introduction and implementation of its branch Social Impact Assessment (SIA) is coming through the process of formation. As a procedure EIA aims reducing or preventing the negative environmental impacts of exploration and industrial projects in all kinds of fields from mining to energy. EIA belongs to Environmental Policy of the country and is performed during the preparation phase of a project. EIA functions both on a national and transnational level, being regulated by the Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context. For instance, in Finland the Ministry of the Environment is a contact authority for national and international assessments.
In its turn SIA is used as an impact prediction mechanism and decision-making tool in regulatory processes to evaluate social impacts in advance of permitting or licensing the decisions. In Europe it arose in the 1970s along with EIA, initially following EIA as much as possible. Later the primary task of SIA aims to improve the management of social issues and to increase project benefits for local impacted communities. It includes all issues of planned intervention of a project, directly and indirectly at any social level from individual person up to community generally. The loss of cultural heritage or biodiversity, valued by people, is also SIA.
All over the world the facts of resource mismanagement deal with tragic experience of indigenous population. There is a little hope, that further developed and advanced knowledge of resource managers could bring changes to their fates. By my research I try to prove, that re-thinking of historically earlier processes provide us with more general and solid picture of ethnic transformations in ethnic nature-use activities and the consequences of these transformations.