2026 Individual Award

Gary Baker, IAIA CEO: There is one further award that we are awarding this year, and that is the Individual Award, which is a very prestigious one. The recipient this year is Dr. Richard Parsons, who is sitting in Australia, eager to tell us much more about what lies behind this award. Congratulations, Richard, and welcome. Please tell us more. We’ll get into a little bit on social impact assessment, but first of all, tell us how you got to be sitting where you are today — that journey through to get you into the position that you are recipient of the Individual Award.

Richard Parsons, Individual Award Winner: Thanks very much, Gary. I almost can’t believe it, to be honest. I certainly never thought I would be winning one of these prestigious awards, and I can probably think of a few dozen other people that in my view would be more deserving recipients of it, but you know, I’m not going to say no, so here I am. Look, it’s a good question how I’ve come to this point. It’s certainly not a linear career path that has led me to be here. When I think back to where I started my work life — which I’ll use as a term rather than career, because it has been rather patchy — my first realization of the deleterious impacts that organizations can have on society and the environment came in my very first job.

When I had not been able to go straight to university, I’d gone to work in an industry which is very far from what I’m doing now, which was the betting industry in horse racing in northern England. I worked for a company that still exists called William Hill. They are in the business of gambling — or profiting from other people’s gambling, more to the point — and I got into that because I was really interested in horse racing when I was younger, which is not something I’m particularly proud of but I found it a really interesting thing when I was in my early teens and for about 10 years thereafter. I worked in the head office of William Hill. At the time, this was a long way before online gambling. Gambling on horses and football and everything else at that time was done mainly over the telephone or in person in betting shops. People would have credit accounts, and they would ring up to place bets on horses mostly. The job of our office was to decide whether or not people had the credit to put those bets on. Often, of course, people don’t have the financial resources to place those bets, but they try to anyway. So often, if someone wanted to place a particularly large bet, there would be a process where it had to be authorized by the office manager. There was one particular occasion that I remember where someone who had a patchy record said that he wanted to place a fairly large bet on a particular horse. It had to be referred to the office manager, and he said, “yes, take the bet, that’s fine.” Then about five minutes later his wife rang the office to say, “will you please stop taking bets from my husband because I can’t afford to feed my family.” That made me realize just how unethical that particular organization was. The next time this person rang to place a bet, there was obviously some concern, but the manager’s response at that time was, “we’re not social services; we’re here to make money.”

At that point I thought, I’ve really had enough of this game. That was when I decided to return to university and further my education. I did a degree in economics and public policy, particularly focusing on the structural aspects of society that create the systems of benefit and impact that we’re now dealing with in the impact assessment world. So that was kind of what first put the light on for me, to make me interested in this kind of area. To cut a long story short, I ended up working in the Office for National Statistics in the UK, where I was a social survey interviewer, collecting data on the labor force survey. That enabled me to see in real life the circumstances in which people were living. I was asking people about their working conditions, or in many cases not-working conditions, given that this was in post-Thatcherite and post-industrial northern England where there were very high levels of unemployment and deprivation.

Those kinds of experiences gave me an awareness and understanding and a desire to do something different and make a difference. At the same time, I was building an awareness of environmental issues and a real interest in the environment. Those kind of things have coalesced in the work choices that I’ve made since then.

Gary: Where’s the dot connection in terms of location then? You’re a long way from Northern England.

Richard: Yeah, that’s right. Well, the climate in Northern England is to make anyone want to leave, isn’t it? But I was actually born in Australia, so I had a connection to Australia from my birth, and I always had an interest in coming back to Australia, but the opportunity didn’t arise until much later. In my early 30s, I decided to do a master’s degree and use that as an opportunity to return to Australia. This was in 2000, when I moved back to Australia. I soon learned about the impact that the mining industry has in Australia, which was not something that was really the case in the UK. I fairly quickly grew an understanding of the impacts, both positive and negative, of the mining industry and also how it has led in some ways, for better or worse, to practices of impact assessment and particularly social impact assessment.

I think that’s probably where it all started. Then the real opportunity came to me in 2016 when I got an opportunity to work with New South Wales Government, which at the time was wanting to develop guidelines in social impact assessment but didn’t know how and so my job was really to provide that internal capacity to develop those guidelines that are now used quite widely.

Gary: I’m interested by that description earlier. That seems to me a pretty good guardrail — this tension between we’re not into social services / we’re into making money and also institutions waking up to the need for better understanding of the social aspects of whatever they may be doing. You’re sitting at this interplay of institutions — universities, governments, corporates, community groups. How have you navigated that? Do you still feel that institutions need to impose this because there is no natural inclination to take responsibility for social factors, or have we come on a long way since then?

Richard: I’ll try my best to answer it. If I take the example of when I was developing the guidelines with New South Wales Government, it was very clear that the drivers for that were multiple, and they came from top and bottom and sideways, by which I mean that the executive of the department saw that there was a need to develop guidance and to have a more structured way of thinking about social impacts in the same way as they already did about environmental impacts. But also industry was requesting this and wanted more clarity and certainty on what regulators required. But I think most importantly and fundamentally, it was community-driven in terms of community expectations and demands that social impacts should be considered at least as significantly as environmental and economic impacts.

There’s always been this feeling within communities that the social impacts — or the impacts that they experience — are the poor cousin of impact assessment in the sense that they’re not taken as seriously or they’re not assessed as rigorously. We could discuss whether that’s right or wrong, but there is certainly that feeling within a lot of communities. So for me, that’s the really powerful part of it – that communities are demanding this and expecting it, and those expectations we’ve seen over time only ever increase. You never hear of communities saying, “actually, we don’t think we need to worry too much about this anymore.” So those expectations and the attention paid to social impacts, I think, is always increasing.

Certainly in Australia, I think the foundation for that comes from — and we can be really thankful for — the environmental justice movements and land rights movements and other rights-based organizations that have really demanded that people are treated fairly and with respect and in the interests of just and equitable outcomes.

Gary: Is your sense that the courts have gone along with that, the legal side of it? Has that been a really important aspect, or is there still a two-speed in evidence on that?

Richard: That’s an interesting question. It’s really interesting, actually, to observe or to consider who is leading progress in this area and which stakeholder group is doing so. Is it industry or is it governments? It’s very rarely governments. Or is it civil society? Or indeed is it legal institutions? I wouldn’t see legal institutions or the courts as necessarily leading in this area, but they can lead significant progress. I’m referring particularly to the Rocky Hill judgment, but also there have been more recent judgments here in Australia where the profile of social impacts in particular, but also climate change impacts, have been raised significantly such that a precedent is set in law as it is now in the Rocky Hill case where social impacts are now taken a lot more seriously — in some cases, not always. For example, a lot of the work that I do now is peer reviews and expert witness work for the courts. So, for example, on behalf of a local community affected by coal mining, I’ve been reviewing an application to extend a coal mine. In my review I can now cite those legal precedents — those court judgements — as being evidence that things like the social impacts of climate change need to be taken seriously as well as the carbon emissions at a technical level. So I think the courts have played a really important role here. Some people might not like that — in industry in particular — but I think it helps to put some kind of force behind this what sometimes seems painfully slow progress.

Gary: We could talk a long time on this. Maybe one final question though. Where do you assess this? Are you optimistic about the direction we’re going in, both within Australia’s situation –because Australia has always struck me as quite advanced or quite looking forward on social impact, and maybe that’s not the case elsewhere in the world or as predominant, but are you optimistic about the pace of change or the direction we’re going in now?

Richard: I have some days when I’m optimistic and some days when I’m less so. When you look at the Rocky Hill judgment, that seemed like a time to be optimistic. And indeed launching the guidelines, that being the first time that the state of New South Wales, which of course is the most populous state of Australia, had a regulatory requirement to consider social impacts. That was a big moment. I should say that happened in 2017, and then it was followed in 2021 with a broader guideline that applies beyond mining to all major developments. So that’s a big leap in terms of the fact that social impacts have to be taken seriously.

But at the same time, you then look at the implementation of that, and there has been some work done on how effective that implementation has been. That’s where it becomes not always easy to be optimistic because you look at some of the social impact assessment reports that are prepared supposedly in accordance with the guidelines. You read them and you think, “how on earth has this passed the requirements because it doesn’t look like it should have done, because there are so many challenges to effective implementation.” For example, we still often find that social impact assessment reports, which are according to the guidelines supposed to be prepared by suitably qualified persons, sometimes are still prepared by people who do not have social science backgrounds or qualifications. They might be trying to do their best but they’re not the right people to be doing an SIA any more than I should be writing a hydrology report or a biodiversity report. I’m very interested in biodiversity, but I don’t have the qualifications to write a report about it.

So we have that massive challenge, but I think the bigger challenge is just the whole systemic or structural situation whereby a lot of practitioners are effectively captured by industry because they depend for their livelihoods themselves on writing a report that pleases their paymasters. In the world of SIA, obviously it’s very contested — there are lot of subjectivities, a lot of different opinions, as there are in other technical disciplines, but in SIA there’s a lot more intangible. It’s very contested, and it can be very easy for proponents who are just wanting their project to get approved to just highlight the benefits supposedly that a project will produce and to down downplay the negative impacts.

So things are changing slowly but I think there’s a lot more work to be done to lift the bar and to have a higher standard as accepted practice as opposed to being something that’s wonderful every now and again.

Gary: Minimum, yeah. I’d love to find more opportunities to talk further about this because I think that gives a flavor as to A) why you’re the award recipient, but I think B) it is a fascinating time to remind people of the importance of social impact assessment if they’d sort of forgotten. I do think that partly through some of the judgements in Australia and elsewhere, there’s been some interesting things obviously going on in Europe as well. Thank you very much for providing a little bit of insight — lifting the lid a little bit — on social impact assessment. There are other awards that we’ve given this year also involving social impact assessment, which is encouraging. Very much deserved. I look forward to seeing you in Québec, and we’ll find another venue where we can talk further about where social impact is going. But thank you very much, Richard Parsons.

Richard: Excellent. Thanks so much, Gary, for your time.