2026 Global Award

Gary Baker, IAIA CEO: Hello, and welcome to IAIA’s 2026 Awards. This is the series where we try and get a little more insight and knowledge into the award recipients this year. To kick things off, I’m really delighted to be joined by Frank Vanclay. He is the recipient of our Global Award this year.

Many of you will already know Frank from his many years of writing, of influencing, of strong opinions in all sorts of forums. This is just a chance to hear directly from him in terms of some of the influences that have got Frank — or helped him to get to — where he is. Welcome, Frank. Many congratulations for your award. And let’s start with an easy one. How come you’re sitting here now? What got you here? How come social impact assessment? All of those things together in one question.

Frank Vanclay, Global Award Winner: Well, if we mean being the recipient of the Global Award, it might be strange to say this, but looking back on my life, I think I’ve been sort of destined for this. I was born to develop social impact assessment. It’s been my life’s passion, and everything about my life has brought me here in a way.

So I’m born in 1960 in Australia to Dutch migrants, and as a migrant family, we also moved around a lot in Queensland, Australia. So I have a sense of being both displaced but also comfortable about change and going to different places and understanding what it takes to fit in and to appreciate. I’m a professor of cultural geography and a professor of social impact assessment and management. Cultural geography is the study of place, and actually all the professors of place are all displaced people because when you’re a displaced person you realize that somehow you connect differently to the landscape or the particular environment or the particular situation than others.

Now not only did we move around but my parents were educated people, and I’m the third child in a family of four. We didn’t have a TV when I grew up, but we talked politics and we talked social justice issues and it was a – well, not quite a hotbed of radicalism — but it was very much a sociological creation of awareness. So at a very early age, I had a strong understanding of social and political issues. Actually a bit relevant is, even though we’re not Catholic, my first name is actually Francis, after Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and the environment, you might say. My second name is Martin, specifically named after Dr. Martin Luther King. So that social justice dimension is already implicit in my name, and I’ve been told that all my life.

I went to school mostly in Mackay in Queensland. It’s sort of halfway between Brisbane and Cairns, and it’s in the tropics. So it’s a very different environment. And by the way, I’m talking to you from Groningen in the Netherlands now. For the last 16 years, Ana Maria Estevez, my wife and I, we’ve been based here in the Netherlands. But I’m quintessentially Australian in lots of ways. Growing up in Mackay in the 1960s and 70s was a very interesting environment because it was a lot of growth, a lot of progress, a lot of corruption. It was a terrible government at the state level there.

My family traveled a lot around Australia — we had the holidays, bushwalking, camping, that sort of thing. My passion was canoeing in the mangrove wetlands. One of the things about wetlands and mangroves is they’re regarded as swamps that are useless, wasteless areas and ripe for real estate development or whatever. So it’s actually one of the environments that’s so lost. And when you realize the incredible beauty and biodiversity of mangroves, this destruction of mangroves is an awful thing. When so much growth and development is done not because of good planning but because of corruption and greed, it really gives you this different perspective on how development should happen.

Now I could see that when places change, it affects not only the environment as a biophysical thing but also it affects people and how they live and what are the issues. So I have this dual interest in both the environmental issues, but especially, and this is where my contribution comes, what are the social consequences of this?

So I went to university in 1978 to a relatively new university called Griffith University, and I did this bachelor’s degree in environmental studies, and I wound up taking all the social science options. Now, because it was a new university, it had imported academics from all over the world, so it was a very interesting place. Again, because it was a brand new course, a lot of the students there were mature-age students. So my undergraduate years were a very fascinating melting pot of all sorts of different ideas and intellectual influences and so on. So after I finished my bachelor’s degree in environmental studies with all the social science issues about the environment, I went on to work in the Institute of Applied Social Research there, doing lots of different research projects about environmental issues and how people are affected by them. I realized I needed to have more skills in social research methods and statistics, so I did a master’s degree in that. Eventually, I started a PhD on the social impacts of tourism in North Queensland.

In 1988, IAIA had its conference at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. So that was my first IAIA conference. And I’ve been to almost all of them ever since. Actually, this year, 2026, will be my 35th IAIA conference. So IAIA was just an excellent place for me to be. I’m a career academic, but I’m also a very applied academic and a very practical academic, and I’ve really made it combining theory but being realistic and practical about this. And IAIA was an excellent environment for me to have this connection to the real world. IAIA conferences are a wonderful blend of practitioners as well as government people as well as academics, and all the stars are there. Maybe that’s me now, but when I was young, of course, it was people like Charlie Wolf, Rabel Burge, Nick Taylor, and Hank Becker. Plus IAIA has wonderful field trips, so going to an IAIA conference for me was doing field work in a way. It really connected me to all the players in IAIA and that got me really drawn into the organization in a big way. As a result of being connected, it meant that I got to do lots of things. I put my hand up to do tasks, I was assigned tasks, I became the SIA Section coordinator, I was on the board of IAIA from 1997 to 2000, and so on.

In about 1997 or so, I also developed an idea to have an international principles. We had the inter-organizational guidelines and principles for social impact assessment, but they were too American — United States-based — and it was time to have something much more international. So I started a process of facilitating workshops to discuss what that would mean. I thought it would be relatively easy because the inter-organizational guidelines and principles were already very good. I thought, it can’t be too hard to make this international. But actually, when you make something international, it’s so much more complicated because there are different cultures, different contexts, different issues. The purpose of what SIA would be needed to change as well. So what I thought was going to be a simple task wound up being a five year…not ordeal, because actually I enjoyed every minute of it and it was such a wonderful learning process. But eventually in 2003 we produced the International Principles for Social Impact Assessment, which are still relevant today.

After that, there was the guidance document because one of the difficulties is we realized that we needed these international principles, and the guidelines had to come after there was agreement about the principles. So there was a separation between higher level issues —  what are the values and principles that SIA should be about — and then the practical guidance would come later. It took quite a number of years later before I had the strength again to embark on a big project. So around 2007-2008, this process started again. Developing the guidance document was a huge task, again, with trying to discuss with different groups of people what it would be and trying to come to some sort of consensus. It took many years, and in 2015 we finally finished the guidance document.

Gary: It’s interesting — it raises a question as to the progress and these quantum leaps we’ve seen, particularly in some SIA practices. This theory of change, if you will — does it come from top down or is it more from bottom up and seeing grievances or seeing problems on the ground and then that is generating change? Where do those things meet?

Frank: Very good question because it’s both. Social impact assessment is more than just a community engagement process, and in fact in IAIA we have a Public Participation Section in addition to a Social Impact Assessment Section because there are different methodologies and different philosophies that underpin those two discourses even though they’re somewhat about the same thing. But the primary difference is that SIA is an analytical process of thinking about what the social impacts of a project might be. It’s also about planning how to deal with those issues. It’s not just the process of allowing communities to have a voice in the process. But the two are related because SIA strongly believes in the importance, and we might say that social impact assessment enables or represents a community in decision making to some extent, but actually communities should have their own say in decision making. SIA is separate to the real need for proper engagement and proper participation.

Gary: If you take that one step on and it gets into one other topic, which I think is very interesting for a lot of members, is where technological progress fits into that — where AI fits into that. Can social impact assessment be digitized, or are the values just so fundamental that it’s always going to be a problem or a challenge?

Frank: I’m watching the developments of AI very closely, and of course being an academic it’s a major issue for academics and what’s going to constitute proper contribution and authorship and so on — so lots of issues. While I’m also aware of the benefits of AI and how it helps (and in our recent state of the art paper, we have quite a bit of a discussion around the contribution that AI might make), it also presents a real threat because AI should never be a replacement for the engagement that’s needed. So AI might help us understand what impacts might be — I can accept that. And I think AI will help people who don’t know very much about the topic and consultants who don’t want to do a proper job, but I would think that proper social impact assessment should go beyond doing AI. It requires really thinking what the issues are and proper engagement with local communities.

Gary: Over the years, you’ve led very successful PhD programs, and you’ve mentored a lot of people coming into the industry. How have you balanced that with your own research and the teaching, the scholarship, the writing guidance documents? Where do you find that blend?

Frank: Well, I think it’s actually the strength in the blend. Part of the reason of who I am and what I know is because of all of the PhD students I’ve had. I have done a lot of original firsthand research myself, but in terms of the social impact assessment in different contexts, that’s done primarily through PhD students. So in some ways I say I’m an executive researcher where by supporting PhD students I’ve had this wonderful access to lots of different places all over the world, and I’ve been able to not only help them in getting PhDs and going on to have very productive careers hopefully, but I’ve also learned an enormous lot in that process.

Gary: Sorry, I know we’re short on time, but there’s a couple of other questions I’d love to get into. One is, what’s your overall assessment as to where social impact assessment is now as a profession? Are you hopeful in the direction it’s going? Are you optimistic about where that goes? And then there’s a second point, which is knowing what you know now, what would have been the sort of message to young Francis Vanclay when he was sort of setting off on this way back when in Queensland? What would you be telling yourself now?

Frank: Well, there’s a lot involved in those. The world is at an awful time right now, and I am sure that various political leaders will use this — given that we have poor leaders — to make negative changes. There is a real risk facing good governance and the world right now. I’m hoping that into the future there will be a new generation of leaders who are much more effective — who see what democracy really means — and we will have a much greater role for things like social impact assessment. In the short term, we have not a very comfortable phase ahead, but into the longer future — social impact assessment is about making better decisions, and it’s not a cost to business either because it’s going to assist in avoiding the problems that are going to occur in future.

Gary: Ultimately I’d say it stretches to all aspects of impact assessment. So your final message — what would it be, from what you know now?

Frank: Well, my final message is social impact assessment is important. It’s about making better decisions that will contribute to a better future.

Gary: Frank, you’ve made an enormous contribution to that process and setting people on that path. I’ve got to find some time that we can have a longer conversation on this because there’s so much more to unpack. We will do that. But for the purpose of this awards process, thank you again for your time. Congratulations on your award, and I look forward to seeing you in Quebec.

Frank: Good, thank you very much.