What makes strategic environmental assessment successful environmental assessment? The role of context in the contribution of SEA to decision-making

The expectations of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) regarding the integration of environmental and sustainability concerns into policy-making are high. Although evidence of its impact up to now is only indirect and, more important, appears to be modest, more attention has to be paid to the fact that the term ‘impact’ can be interpreted in different ways and to the importance of context in impact analysis. In this paper, we propose an assessment framework in which these aspects are explicitly addressed. To illustrate and verify the practical value of our framework we analyse four Dutch SEA case studies.