Breadcrumbs
The Quality of Life Assessment Process
Step A: purpose
The same basic approach can help with a wide range of different decisions and planning processes, from site briefs to regional planning guidance. But the details of what you need to do vary greatly with the purpose. So the essential first step is to be clear about the purpose of the study. This guide concentrates on examples from planning and environmental management.
Step B: identifying what is there
The purpose of the exercise (step A) will imply which sources of social, economic and environmental benefits need to be studied. A variety of techniques including traditional survey methods and character assessment may be useful for identifying environmental features depending on scale and circumstances. For example, regional planning guidance will need to look at what is special or important at the level of the region. At the other extreme, a development control application can look solely at the ways the proposed development would affect the local area. For comparing potential development sites already identified, QoL Assessment could concentrate on the differences between them, whereas an exercise carried out to identify possible sites would need to consider the whole area.
Step C: benefits and services
The key to the method is to ask: what are the benefits and services which are potentially affected by the planning process or the decision at issue? Many places or environmental features provide a wide range of different services, and being clear about the purpose of the study enables the work to concentrate on the issues that matter and can be influenced.
Step D: evaluation
This examines the benefits and services systematically, using a series of questions:
- who the services matter to, why, and at what spatial scale:for example habitat quality may matter for biodiversity at a regional or national scale, while recreational access may matter for quite specific groups of people from a small local area;
- how important are they,which is a distinct question from the previous one: a service that matters at national level is not necessarily more important than one that matters only locally;
- whether we have enough of them– it is more important to maintain services which are in short supply (or in danger of becoming so) than ones that are plentiful (though obviously there are degrees of scarcity, and the method should not be used as an excuse to let things decline to the minimum acceptable level). Where we currently do not have enough, the aim should be increase;
- what (if anything) could make up for any loss or damage to the service– for example other places local people could go equally readily for the same types of recreation, or other areas that could be managed to support displaced communities of bird species. (Many services - notably historical and cultural significance - can not be substituted.)
Expert judgement and community views both need to be reflected, so QoL Assessment draws on both public consultation and involvement processes and technical appraisal methods including (for environmental benefits and services) environmental impact assessment, landscape, ecological, archaeological and characterisation studies.
Step E: Policy / management implications
From the evaluation, this step draws clear messages about the aims or policies which would be needed to ensure that social, economic and environmental benefits were maintained or enhanced rather than damaged. The form these take will depend on what decision or process the exercise is feeding in to. For example structure plan policies need to be framed very differently to planning obligations for a particular site – another reason why it is so important to be clear about the purpose for the study in advance.
Step F: monitoring
The benefits and services identified as important in the process are, for this very reason, the aspects of the environment which should be monitored. QoL Assessment thus provides its own performance indicators.
