Assessing Expected Impacts

Assessing the expected impacts of proposed strategies is a difficult task because it involves projection into the future. This chapter offers guidance, drawing attention to the potential approaches and the advantages and difficulties involved. An initial choice needs to be made about whether to adopt simple or more sophisticated approaches. The sophistication of the assessment should increase with the scale and complexity of the strategy; the financial, time, data and human resources available; the degree of political demand, and; with the level of understanding of the user.