A SYSTEMIC FRAMEWORK FOR ENVIRONMENTAL DECISION-MAKING

The context of sustainable development poses new challenges for traditional environmental decision-making tools, such as environmental impact assessment, environmental management system and life cycle assessment. Today these tools are expected to provide multi-disciplinary information to aid sustainability decisions, not just to inform decisions about environmental effects. This paper brings together the different perspectives of authors from EIA, EMS and clean technology/LCA to examine critically the separate tools in the context of sustainable development, and their inter-relationships, and identifies a "tool-user's dilemma": whether to use a tool as intended, to adapt it or develop something new. The paper examines the similarities of these key tools and recognises both a paradigm shift and a congruence in the way in which they have developed: from being merely tools, through being techniques to approaches. The paper concludes by suggesting an integrated framework within which the tools can continue to operate effectively, and one that helps resolve the tool-user's dilemma. Clean Technology is seen as providing a useful philosophical understanding for the operation of this outline framework.

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