Social Impact Assessment and the COBRA project Working Paper, May 2013 Andrea Berardi, Lecturer in Environmental Information Systems, The Open University, UK Abstract This paper outlines current practice in Social Impact Assessment (SIA) within the COBRA Project, a joint venture aimed at supporting community solutions to emerging social, economic and environmental challenges. A number of established SIA tools are explored with a view to strengthen community engagement and learning. Benefits and challenges of implementing SIA techniques are discussed and a conclusion is provided on the future of SIA within COBRA and the wider third sector. COBRA’s current practice in relation to SIA best practice COBRA stands for "Community Owned Best practice for sustainable Resource Adaptive management in the Guiana Shield, South America", and was created from the experiences of two well-established initiatives in the Guiana Shield region, the Wetlands Partnership (Mistry et al, 2010) and the Guiana Shield Initiative (www.guianashield.org). COBRA brings together academic institutions, civic society organisations and communities across Europe and South America. Our particular strengths lie in building community capacity to use participatory visual communication to record, evaluate and disseminate community solutions to current and emerging challenges, such as climate change. Our long-term aim is to direct financial support from international policies towards community owned solutions. Our proposal to the European Commission was explicit in stating intended impact on a range of stakeholders, from communities to international policymakers. The project specifically addresses issues of quality of life, health, safety, employment, environment and access rights to natural resources. In other words, the project has social impact at its heart. We are now at a stage where a range of community solutions have been recorded and evaluated, and these 'best practices' will be disseminated and implemented within a wider range of indigenous communities across the Guiana Shield. Thus, the next phase will explicitly contain a strong 'social and environmental impact assessment' component where we will be evaluating the impact of a range of community owned solutions. According to Social Enterprise East of England (2009), social impact measurement is the process of providing: ‘evidence that your organisation - whether it is a social enterprise, voluntary or community organisation or traditional business - is doing something that provides a real and tangible benefit to other people or the environment.’ (SEEE 2009) A more detailed definition is provided by the International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA):