Social Impact Assessment
Year:2020 | Volume:1 | Issue:3|Papers Count:6

The city management of the 12th district of Tehran’ s municipality plans to build a boostan, fruit and vegetable field and Food-court as the three suggested options for the 2012 square-meter space in the Darvazeh Shemiran neighborhood. This article tries to assess the feasibility of building each project in terms of social and cultural outcomes, while assessing the needs of the residents of the neighborhood. To reach this goal, a survey of 387 people was conducted and an interview has been conducted with 11 local and regional directors, according to the population of 33297 residents using the Cochran formula. For the Need evaluation and feasibility evaluation of the projects, the theoretical framework of sustainable urban development was used based on the concept of the public sphere. After review, the result was that considering the importance of the public sphere and the urgent need of the Darvazeh Shemiran neighborhood, the construction of the boostan at the intended place should be prioritized to the other two options, the fruit field and the Food court. The other result is that considering the division of Tehran into different neighborhoods and the policy of the central neighborhood in Tehran’ s urban management, providing urban services is based on the neighborhood while it seems that the “ neighborhood” criterion for providing urban services should be changed to the “ distance” and “ population” criteria. In the end, for better use of the boostan and its definition as a public sphere, suggestions such as the construction of a historic museum in the place of Boostan and the revitalization of the Vali mill in the neighborhood have been presented.

This research was conducted to assess the socio-cultural impacts of Golabdarreh Park in Region 1 of Tehran Municipality and mainly has aimed to identify stakeholders and obstacles of the project. It also provided solutions to improve the status quo and decrease citizens’ social problems. This research was descriptive from the viewpoint of procedure and applied from the viewpoint of objective, and the data were collected through documentary and field method. In the documentary section, all of the presented documents were reviewed and in the field section, 300 residents were chosen as a sample and the questionnaire was administered on them. At the same time, the municipal managers, the operational officials and the concerned institutions were interviewed by semi-structured interview procedure with purposive and convenience sampling. The findings showed that the construction of the park had both positive and negative impacts, but the positive ones outweighed the negative ones. The most important positive impacts included restraining from illegal constructions and land-grabbing, generating a green belt in Alborz mountain range, changing the families’ behavior patterns, increasing environmental aesthetics, decreasing noises and air pollution, increasing health and social interactions, and creating job opportunities.

The present paper aims to review the social impact assessment reports conducted by Tehran Municipality and to specify their pros and cons with a focus on the variables affecting the current conditions of this field of research. With that end in view, after several stages of screening 89 reports was selected and systematically reviewed with a qualitative approach and an in-depth perspective in order to study their various structural, formal and content specifications and to identify available faults. Therefore the first step was to develop a protocol and design an instrument to extract needed information from the reports. In the next step, descriptive outputs were taken from the software to give the designed indicators comparability, and in the end an overall image of these reports was provided.

This article reviews the literature and practice of social impact assessment (SIA) to address some of the perennial questions faced by all fields of impact assessment. What scope is there to extend impact assessment beyond individual projects? How might the different branches fit together? What is the relationship between scientific assessments and public participation? It argues that the relative marginalization of SIA has limited the effectiveness and influence of all aspects of impact assessment. However, this marginalization cannot be blamed entirely on the technocratic world views and political agendas of project proponents, governments and scientific agencies. The strength of SIA is undermined also by a failure to resolve fundamental theoretical contradictions concerning the objects and methods of impact assessment, in particular, the contested role of prediction in SIA. While closure on these issues may not be possible, acknowledgement and clarification of them does suggest positive routes forward for impact assessment.

Despite the importance of social impact to social entrepreneurship research, standards for measuring an organization’ s social impact are underdeveloped on both theoretical and empirical grounds. We identify a sample of 71 relevant papers from leading (FT50) business journals that examine, conceptually or empirically, the measurement of social impact. We first describe the breadth of definitions, data sources, and operationalizations of social impact. Based on this analysis, we generate a typology of four approaches to conceptualizing social impact, which we use to organize insights and recommendations regarding improved measurement of the social impact of entrepreneurial ventures.