Hierarchy of social impacts: towards a consolidated method for a representative social impact prioritization
Résumé
Social Life Cycle Assessment involves assessing numerous social impact categories associated with several stakeholders. To do so, extensive data collection is needed and can be expensive and time-consuming (UNEP, 2020). Moreover, depending on the scope definition (i.e., sectors and geographical areas), the social impact subcategories proposed by UNEP Guidelines may not all have the same relevance. Applying a prioritization step is, thus, crucial to guide data collection efforts. The approach to prioritize the social impact categories to be evaluated strongly influences the legitimacy of the assessment (Bouillass, 2021). However, some bottlenecks still exist, including: 1) difficult access to some stakeholders themselves, 2) lack of understanding of the method by respondents, 3) need for measuring the level of sample representativeness of results. Given these difficulties, the following question about participatory approach may be formulated: “How to ensure that the respondents of a survey represent well their stakeholder category?”. This work proposes to validate the representativeness of prioritization results based on a participatory approach. A statistical procedure is used to define a sampling protocol, build surveys, and process data (Ladenburg and Dubgaard, 2007). Firstly, a set of parameters (e.g., companies’ size, companies’ activities, etc.) are identified to describe the stakeholder category as a whole. Secondly, the values of these parameters at the stakeholder category level are compared with those observed at the sample level. Thirdly, if a significant difference is observed between the category and the sample, a statistical adjustment (i.e., weighting) is applied to the dataset. The approach is here applied to the offshore wind power sector. This case study will show how the proposed statistical approach can strengthen the representativeness of the participatory approach to prioritize social impact subcategories.