Social Impact Assessment: Who wins and who loses in SIA?
When the dust settles on your project, who comes out ahead? One way to answer this is by embedding distributive equity in your Social Impact Assessment (SIA).
Here’s how you can use your SIA to level the playing field and use distributive equity as a tool for shared wins and fewer losses.
What is distributive equity?
Distributive equity is about making sure the benefits and burdens of your project are shared fairly across affected stakeholders as much as possible.
In the context of social impact assessment, this means clearly identifying, assessing and addressing how different groups experience your project’s positive and negative impacts. Particularly, vulnerable and marginalised groups, future generations compared with current generations, and differences by gender, age and cultural groups.
Embedding distributive equity in your SIA means asking the tough questions like:
Who stands to gain from your project, and by how much?
Who bears the brunt of negative impacts?
Are vulnerable groups being disproportionately affected?
The NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure’s Social Impact Assessment Guidelines (SIA Guidelines) highlight distributive equity as a core principle of SIA because different people and groups - whether defined by age, gender, culture, or socioeconomic status - often experience impacts differently.
Why distributive equity matters
If you’re planning or developing a state significant development or infrastructure (SSD or SSI) project in NSW, here’s why distributive equity should be on your radar:
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It meets community expectations: Communities today are both vocal and informed. They want fairness in how projects impact their lives, and they’re quick to raise concerns if they feel overlooked.
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It aligns with NSW Government expectations: The NSW SIA Guidelines emphasise equity. Projects that ignore this, risk not meeting regulatory expectations.
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It improves project outcomes: Working to distribute or respond to equity imbalance builds trust and support, leading to reduced risk for implementation and better long-term success.
Equity isn't just ethical. It helps secure social licence and reduce project risks.
How to embed distributive equity in your SIA
1. Start early with meaningful engagement
Early engagement helps you identify potential winners and losers before conflicts or tensions appear. It helps you uncover exactly which benefits (and mitigation measures) matter most to different groups, and how to deliver them in a way that is fair and authentic.
How to do it well:
Use stakeholder mapping, community profiling and direct outreach to understand the diverse and unique needs of impacted groups.
Scale your engagement to reflect the significance of the social impacts (proportionate)
Use diverse and inclusive methods and techniques of participation to support equitable access for vulnerable and marginalised groups. Tailor your methods (host workshops, use visual aids or hire interpreters if needed).
Use culturally responsive and respectful engagement design and methods to encourage each group to participate in identifying impacts and responses.
Create meaningful dialogue where participants experience the process of engagement as a procedurally fair, equal exchange of views – a meaningful conversation where their input can actively influence project decisions.
Elements of meaningful and effective engagement (Briar 2025)
People are more likely to support your project down the line when they see you’re genuinely listening (not just going through the motions).
2. Understand and map social locality effectively
The social locality represents the spatial extent of likely social impacts, both positive and negative (and the scale, location and distribution of those impacts).
How to do it well:
Map the intensity and distribution of positive and negative impacts
Avoid arbitrary boundaries (e.g. suburb names) or misleading radius (e.g. 200m from the project location)
Refine after scoping
Demonstrate focus and proportionality of your SIA
Visualise social impacts rather than the initial ‘study area’.
To get your social locality right, read our article on how to map the social locality of your project.
Don’t rely solely on government boundaries or land use zones. Focus on how people’s lives intersect with your project (not arbitrary lines on a map).
3. Focus on the most impacted groups
When you know who will likely be the most impacted, you can focus your engagement and communication (avoiding consultation fatigue), address concerns before they escalate, avoid rising tensions and develop mitigation measures that address real concerns.
How to do it well:
Tailor your engagement methods to reach voices which are often unrepresented.
Avoid generalisations about vulnerability. Use nuanced, disaggregated data (not just averages) to pinpoint who is most at risk then validate this with the community.
Identify difference and diversity in lived experience, interests, values, concerns, and aspirations across the community. There may be a ‘majority’ or dominant experience or view, but a good SIA will report difference, divergence, and dissent.
Assess whether your project will exacerbate or ameliorate social inequalities, vulnerabilities and disadvantage.
Remember: Vulnerability is dynamic. Labelling entire demographics as vulnerable without nuanced understanding can perpetuate stereotypes, marginalise those who need agency and overlook capacities.
Different people respond to projects and their impacts in different ways. When a project has disproportionate impacts on a particular population or group, such as small business, women, Aboriginal communities, or people living in regional or remote areas, this should be considered in your analysis and evaluation of impacts.
4. Quantify and qualify impacts clearly
Decision-makers respond to data, but equity isn't just numbers, it’s about lived experiences. A balanced approach will lead to a clearer, stronger argument.
How to do it well:
Pair quantitative data (e.g., census stats, economic modelling) with qualitative insights (e.g., real-life stories, recent change to social landscape) to paint a complete picture of social impacts for decision-makers and the public.
Explain your logic. How do impacts and benefits translate into lived experiences.
Avoid relying on single indicators (e.g. ‘big jobs numbers’) without the social context. Ask, ‘what are the likely social consequences of those jobs’ e.g. comparable projects may have shown that such jobs in a similar community indirectly improved people’s health and wellbeing, and improved community cohesion and social equity because they were directly targeted at economically marginalised groups.
5. Mitigate losses, amplify benefits
Even the best projects cause some disruption. Effective SIAs manage these disruptions strategically.
How to do it well:
Manage impacts. Prioritise avoiding impacts, then minimising, and finally mitigating through proportionate commitments to specific actions.
Refine or redefine project elements in response to predicted social impacts and engagement outcomes. E.g. adjust operating hours, refine project layout (increase distance from residents, relocate construction access roads), include a community garden, traffic rerouting.
Support local workers and businesses by hiring or sourcing locally. Projects can bring significant and long-lasting benefits to communities through business-as-usual activities such as hiring local workers and procuring goods and services from local businesses.
Secure and enhance benefits. Use community feedback to shape meaningful benefits that address local needs and priorities.
Compensation isn’t the same as community benefits. Use community input to shape benefits, project refinements and mitigation measures that genuinely address local needs and priorities.
6. Communicate often and continuously
Communities want to know their input leads to action. Rather than just collecting information, act on it.
How to do it well:
Maintain clear feedback loops, clearly showing how community feedback has shaped decisions.
Follow up on commitments openly and promptly.
7. Think long-term
Social impacts don’t stop once construction does. Operations often have different impacts to construction phases.
How to do it well:
Consider the lifecycle of the project (construction through to operations)
Implement monitoring frameworks to ensure equitable outcomes continue throughout the project’s lifecycle
Check back in, gather information and use these insights to adjust your strategies as needed and address emerging issues.
Visualising distributive equity in your SIA
Clear visualisation of impacts helps communities and regulators understand distributive equity. Good visual tools break down complex ideas into accessible information, clearly showing who experiences the highest impacts across different project phases and locations.
Distributive equity of social impacts across social locality (Briar, 2025)
- Map distribution of positive and negative impacts across different phases.
- Categorise impacts by their intensity and their spatial extent.
- Show the spatial distribution of impacts to visualise which groups are likely to experience the highest impacts
- Demonstrate your project's strategic response to these impacts.
The value of clear data
A distributional analysis helps you go beyond simply listing impacts to showing who is affected and how. It adds depth to your SIA by showing how positive and negative impacts are distributed across different cohorts of a community.
Assessing the distribution of impacts can be:
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Simple: Where the scale of impact is low, a simple quantitative or descriptive approach (e.g., light data review) might be enough.
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Detailed: Where the scale of impacts is high, you might need a deeper review of how different groups are impacted (e.g., in-depth appraisal and detailed calculation of distributional effects).
Why distributive equity pays off
When SIA prioritises distributive equity:
Communities feel respected. They’re more likely to support your project.
Regulators trust you: They see you as a partner, not a problem.
Your project thrives: A good reputation leads to smoother approvals and long-term success.
Distributive equity minimises risks while maximising rewards. A project that values equity wins support, reduces objections and earns a reputation for excellence.
How Briar can help
At Briar, we specialise in helping developers, planners and applicants unlock the value of Social Impact Assessments.
Whether you’re grappling with a complex SSD or SSI application or just trying to figure out where to start, we’re here to help you move things forward.
Get in touch to learn more about how Briar can help bring value to your project SIA.