Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA): Seeking Sustainability

ABSTRACT The world is currently facing wicked problems caused by humanities’ environmental footprint. Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) is a holistic, systematic high‐level planning and decision‐making instrument designed to assess impacts of wicked problems, and the strategic actions developed to address them. This assessment approach places sustainability at the forefront and seeks to identify effective solutions whilst anticipating cumulative impacts of proposed strategic actions over the long‐term, for up to 100 years. Although this long‐term planning approach may appear out‐of‐scope for many evaluators and organizations, we argue that SEA as a pluralistic methodology offers everyday evaluators a framework for expanding thinking and practice that allows evaluators to embrace sustainability, and to think about knowledge creation in new and novel ways. Becoming comfortable with sustainability and knowledge creation will build confidence in evaluator's ability to work across both strategy and tactics and inform decision‐making for their clients. Hence, this article provides an overview of SEA with a focus on sustainability and the methodologies adopted by SEA practitioners. We argue this approach can value‐add to everyday evaluation practice by adopting a long‐term, sustainability focus and stepping from the tactical space of policy, plans and programs into the front‐end strategic space where policy, plans and programs, and solutions to wicked problems are created.