manual for social impact assessment of land-based ... - Forest Trends

medium-term behavioral or systemic changes, additional factors will be needed to achieve the
desired impacts.
Impact drivers
Impact drivers are factors that are within the power of the project to influence, and which if they are
present would help the achievement of project objectives. They derive from the project or from
associated initiatives (e.g., supportive state actions), and typically address barriers or constraints to
achieving impacts. They often relate to financial, institutional, socio-economic and political
sustainability, such as fundraising, quality control, institutional capacity, collaboration between
government agencies and local communities, linkages between social initiatives and carbon goals,
etc. An important impact driver for land-based carbon projects is an effective, transparent and
accountable benefit-sharing system. They can also relate to scaling up issues, e.g., an impact driver
could be an effective farmer or community aggregation strategy.
External assumptions
External assumptions are similar to project drivers, but are outside the control of the project. The
assumptions column of the logical framework is a good place to start identifying external
assumptions. Examples for carbon projects are a gradually increasing carbon price, or successful
UNFCCC negotiations which would stimulate the demand and price of carbon.
Synthesizing the causal model with focus groups
Based on the above, it is now possible to construct the project's overall theory of change or causal
model, and to assess the likelihood of achieving the desired impacts. It is necessary to assess each
means-end relationship contained in the causal model independently. This should be done via a
combination of desk research, consultations with focus groups composed of project stakeholders,
and 'ground-truthing' at the project site. The focus group exercise is central and involves three main
steps (see Figure T8):
• Brainstorming around the project outcomes and impacts, and the extent to which these are
being achieved. A key question is: What do you think the project has achieved so far?
• Brainstorming the intermediate states between the outcomes and impacts, and their current
status. Key questions are: What has been achieved so far that has contributed to project
impacts? What else must happen to achieve the intended impacts?
• Brainstorming the factors (impact drivers and external assumptions) responsible for success
or failure in achieving the intermediate states (having clarified the current status of the
intermediate states). The key question is: What were the reasons for success or failure in
delivering the intermediate states?
It is recommended that visualization techniques are used to explain the theory of change, and to
facilitate collective thinking. Thus the outputs, outcomes, desired impacts, intermediate states,
impact drivers, assumptions, etc. should be written on colored cards and put on a large board or
Social Impact Assessment of Land-Based Carbon Projects (1.0) – Part II | 13