CHAPTER 35: The need for ethnographic methods in impact assessment

Peter Drucker is attributed with saying that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’, meaning that the best planned organizational strategy can be derailed by how it plays out in different contexts. The famous management guru couldn’t be more right, with much academic literature and social impact assessment (SIA) practice establishing that many projects have failed due to inadequate consideration of local culture and the daily life and social organization in local communities. Project failure is often related to the corporate culture of the project team (Kendra & Taplin, 2004), which tends to ignore local interests and the local context where the project will be implemented (Hanna et al., 2016a). These contexts might contain pre-existing tensions between and among local groups and multi-level stakeholders. These tensions are not usually considered in project planning (Barrett, 2013; Adusei-Asante & Hancock, 2016). We suggest that the use of ethnographic research in SIA, environmental impact assessment (EIA), and arguably in other forms of impact assessment, can vastly improve understanding of the local context, improve the quality of the impact assessments, and, if the information is taken on board by the project, to better outcomes for communities and the overall performance of the project.