SEA IN THE CONTEXT OF LANDTUSE PLANNING

widespread voluntary application of the SEA process by authorities at the national, regionaland local levels also took place. As well as the introduction of the SEA requirements intonational legislation, international bodies have also endorsed SEA. In 2001, the EuropeanUnion (EU) introduced the directive ‘On the assessment of the effects of certain plans andprogrammes on the environment’ (2001/42/EC) which had to be implemented in all EUmember countries, as well as in the countries subject to the Agreement of the EuropeanEconomic Area. Furthermore, the Protocol on Strategic Environmental Assessment – the socalled'SEA Protocol' that supplements the Convention on Environmental ImpactAssessment in a Trans-boundary Context (Espoo), was signed in Kiev in 2003. Thesedemands present a definition of what SEA is, the role of SEA and the main steps of the SEAprocess. The introduction of these requirements means that the countries involved needed tomake legal adjustments to implement the directive, while note should also be made of the factthat the directive had to be implemented at the different operational planning levels. TheSEA requirements needed to become an integral part of the existing planning system, bothwith regard to the national planning legislation as well as planning practices.3.1.2 The concept of SEAThere is no unanimity as to when the term ‘strategic environmental assessment’ or SEA wasfirst used to refer to a particular instrument. Scholars generally agree it was first usedsometime in the 1980s and the first academic publications including the term was aconference paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Association forImpact Assessment in 1990 by Wood and Djeddour (Dalal-Clayton and Sadler 2005; Bina2003). In the paper Wood and Djeddour introduce the term as a more strategic alternative toproject EIA:“The environmental assessments appropriate to policies, plans and programmes are of a more strategicnature than those applicable to individual projects and are likely to differ from them in severalimportant respects [...] We have adopted the term ‘strategic environmental assessment’ (SEA) todescribe this type of assessment [...]” (Wood and Djeddour 1990).The notion of assessing the environmental impact of plans, programmes and policies dates,however, further back, and as early as 1969, the need to assess the environmental impacts of‘proposals for legislation and other major Federal Actions significantly affecting the quality ofthe human environment’ is included in the US' National Environmental Policy Act (section102 [2][c])5. Since the mid-1980s, the literature on SEA has steadily increased, both in termsof academic publications, focusing on the meaning of the concept, and practice reports,focusing on the actual experiences of SEA application. With the expansion of SEA legalprovisions and application ranging from local authorities to international organisations, wehave therefore seen a continuing diversification of SEA approaches and applications. At thesame time, several attempts have been made to define what sort of a ‘tool’ SEA is, and inparticular, what the main steps of the process entail and what the desired outcome of theSEA application should be. These definitions have resulted in the emergence of a number of‘best-practice’ recommendations both in respect of the main steps of the process, and interms of the aspects that should be included. Potential examples here include the IAIA’sStrategic Environmental Assessment Performance Criteria (IAIA, Special Publication SeriesNo. 1 January 2002), and the identification of SEA as a key implementation tool in the WorldBank’s environmental strategy (World Bank 2002).Finland in 1999 and environmental assessment of specified plans and programmes in the Netherlands in 1987.5 NEPA’s references to ‘Major Federal Actions’ does not distinguish between projects and more strategicinitiatives. However, the Federal Regulations interpret the term to mean policies, plans and programmes.27