Main objectives | Origins | Is / is not | Practitioners |
The Method
Strategic Environmental Analysis (SEAN) is part of the family of Environmental Assessment tools, more specifically of the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) family. SEAN takes the environmental dimension as a starting point but then establishes linkages with other development issues, so it would also be part of the Integrated or Sustainability Assessment or Planning family of tools.
Broadly, SEAN is a tool to support sustainability assessment and planning, by:
Adopting a positive and pro-active approach to environmental issues;
Integrating environmental with other development and sustainability issues;
Addressing these issues at early stages in the planning and policy cycle;
Being part of a process approach that is participatory (to achieve ownership), continuous (to guarantee follow-up) and transparent.
To judge whether SEAN can be useful for you, read more under the headings of objectives, origins and is / is not.
To get a feeling of how SEAN is being implemented, look at the ten analytical steps that can be implemented to create insight in the relation between environment and development issues, resulting in a concrete plan with integrated environmental issues. Then look at the 5 process phases which describe the participatory process of undertaking SEAN, including preparation, scoping, field work, synthesis and monitoring.
financed by DGIS, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Netherlands.