This practical guide looks at the relevance and the feasibility of a citizen-participation strategy in the context of a health impact assessment.
Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is a practice that aims to estimate the potential impacts of policies, programs or projects on population health, so as to minimize the negative and maximize the positive effects. The founding documents of HIA, and in particular the Gothenburg Consensus Paper (European Centre for Health Policy, 1999), identify citizen participation as one of its cornerstones.
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This guide introduces a framework for reflection to assist HIA practitioners who are trying to determine whether it is relevant for them to develop a citizen-participation strategy and, if so, what form this should take.
More specifically, it will allow practitioners to:
- Analyze the context within which an HIA is being carried out.
- Determine the following elements:
- the objectives of the citizen-participation strategy;
- which citizens should be involved;
- the step(s) during which citizens should be involved;
- the degree of influence that citizens should exercise.
Developing a Citizen-Participation Strategy for Health Impact Assessment: Practical Guide
46 pages
There are many practical tools in this guide. In order to facilitate their use, we have extracted these tools as standalone versions that you can use.
(In Word format)
Table 1. Analyzing the relevance of participation based on the cornerstones of HIA
Table 2. Analyzing the feasibility of citizen participation in an HIA
Table 3. Objectives of citizen participation in an HIA
Table 4. The five steps in the HIA process
Figure 3. Conceptual map of citizen participation in HIA
