Towards developing policy impact assessment framework: An introduction

Policy impact assessment has received little attention in current discussion on impact assessment frameworks within the International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA), the leading global organisation on impact assessment for informed decision-making. While there are accepted guidelines for strategic environmental assessments, social impact assessments (SIAs) and health impact assessments, there appear to be various siloed policy impact assessment (PIA) guidelines, mainly drawing on programme evaluation models. The lack of a PIA framework means that SIA professionals working on public policies and programmes have to adapt existing impact assessment frameworks or look elsewhere, however discrepant the field. This can create validation problems when comparing studies from different jurisdictions. This paper is an introduction to discussions on the need to develop a PIA framework within the IAIA, and argues that relevant policy analysis models could be drawn on and developed into one coherent but adaptable IAIA-led PIA framework