SEA IN THE CONTEXT OF LANDTUSE PLANNING

assessment instruments such as Risk Assessment, Environmental Auditing and Cost-BenefitAnalysis, where Environmental Assessment can be regarded as a 'process’ while the othersare regarded as 'tools'. This implies that SEA cannot be regarded as a neutral tool, but is anintegral part of the process where it is applied and serves its purpose (Wallington 2002).Many of the issues currently discussed in the field have however simply re-emerged withtime, while others have remained persistent themes throughout the 1990s (Bina 2003). Suchissues include SEA’s ‘EIA heritage’ (addressed by Partidário and Clark 2000), the move fromfocusing on environmental impacts to the actual sources of impacts (addressed by Sadler2001), and importance of scoping (also included in Bina 2001). Similarly, some of the issuesidentified in Therivel et al (1992), as problematic such as the over-simplification of thehierarchy of policies, plans and programmes, as well as the 'messiness' of the planningsystems with unclear system boundaries, the lack of information, and uncertainty due to thepolitical nature of decision making were subsequently reiterated by Noble (2002); Nilsson andDalkman (2001); Renton and Bailey (2000) and Kørnøv and Thissen (2000). Finally, theinclusion of sustainable development as an issue for SEA, and the accompanying challenges,was already identified by Therivel et al (1992) and has been also addressed in Partidário andClark (2000); Sadler (1996) and Owens and Cowell (2002).29