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Deciding over nature: Corruption and environmental impact assessments

Environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are a core aspect of environmental decision-making in most countries. Despite massive potential for public harms resulting from corrupt decision-making linked to EIAs, research on this topic is still very limited. We consider the main generic corruption risks in carrying out EIAs and provide suggestions for what public agencies, including development aid donors, might do to mitigate them.

Our analysis provides a systematic literature review of the topic, supplemented by fieldwork-based case analysis of the EIA process in Albania. We find that a range of poor practice currently afflicts Albania’s EIA system and that the present accountability and monitoring framework for EIAs does little to mitigate various corruption risks.

18 November 2016
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Deciding over nature: Corruption and environmental impact assessments

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Dupuy, K.; Williams, A. (2016) Deciding over nature: Corruption and environmental impact assessments. Bergen: Chr. Michelsen Institute (U4 Issue 2016:5) 22 p

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About the authors

Kendra Dupuy

Dr. Kendra Dupuy is a political economist working on research about natural resource and energy management, the education sector, and civil society. Formerly a Senior Adviser at U4, she is currently an affiliated researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute.

Aled Williams is a political scientist and senior researcher at Chr. Michelsen Institute and a principal adviser at the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre. He is responsible for U4's thematic work on corruption in natural resources and energy, and holds a PhD from SOAS, University of London, on political ecology of REDD+ in Indonesia.

Disclaimer


All views in this text are the author(s)’, and may differ from the U4 partner agencies’ policies.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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