Contributions to social participation in strategic environmental assessment processes, based on the application of a case study in Costa Rica

Abstract

Strategic environmental assessment is a methodological tool used for the integration of environmental issues in highly complex problems in order to incorporate them into policies, projects, plans or programs A particular issue of SEA is that it contemplates and encourages the participation of various social and institutional actors, given the impact that some proposed actions may generate. For this reason, the objective of this paper is to provide some contributions for the participation of these actors in these processes, based on the experience of the SEA for the World Heritage Site of the Cordillera de Talamanca Reserves - La Amistad International Park (Costa Rica) developed by ProDUS-UCR in 2021. This process was carried out through two modalities: virtual and face-to-face, in which techniques such as surveys, telephone interviews, virtual meetings and workshops were used to generate spaces for discussion, validation and proposal generation from a participatory perspective. These contributions highlight the importance of participation in the SEA, since it allows the process to be more in line with the real and contextualized needs of the population and place. In addition, they also become active agents and generators of proposals for their own environment, thus highlighting the importance of considering issues such as age, culture, ethnicity, among others.