[en] Social impact assessment (SIA) is well-established but uses conventional approaches that have become less effective in recent decades, particularly in relation to declining survey response rates and a lack of youth engagement. Images from digital archives and social media sources are poised to advance the research and practice of SIA by transcending text-based methods with insights into changing landscapes, and human engagement with them. This viewpoint describes progress, challenges and cautions toward the development of such tools (defined as culturomics), using hydroelectricity cases to illustrate potential approaches. These tools build on foundational work in a range of disciplines, including the humanities and computer science. We describe necessary advances in machine learning, image digitization, and data aggregation and visualization techniques, as well as ways to ensure that such tools are carefully tested, applied and interpreted. Challenges include the automation, acquisition and management of datasets, and using these tools appropriately and equitably. Critically, culturomics of any kind must not be used as a replacement for engagement with people, but as complementary to inclusive stakeholder engagement. - Highlights: •Image-based digital archives and social media present opportunities for new SIA tools. •Application-ready big data approaches are emerging across many fields. •SIA scholars, practitioners and stakeholders should engage with culturomics. •Challenges include automation, digitization, interpretation and justice. •Culturomics of any kind must not replace engagement with people.

[en] The introduction consists of invited literature to the Second Regional Meeting on Nuclear Energy in central Europe describing the development of European Nuclear Society

[en] This paper explores the potential role of social capital variables on the transport mode choice. Traditionally travel behavior model included social capital as empowerment factor (i.e. social capital as substitute of financial capital) or as social network influence on travel choice. Only recently constraints of social capital are considered as factors influencing travel behavior (Swanen et al, 2015, Di Ciommo & Martens, 2015).This article will show both aspects of empowerments and constraints of social capital in a dynamic way stressing two dynamic aspects of social capital: the building up social capital and use of social capital. Both aspects are related with the value of time: when you are doing something for others ( i.e. Voluntary actions, pick up all family members, etc) you are loosing your time, and your mode choice will be oriented to saving time, therefore a private mode will be chosen, while when you are using your social capital benefit (somebody else is helping you), you will easily choose the less flexible and more time consuming public transport. After defining social capital notion in both aspects of empowerments and constraints, a set of social capital variables is defined. Then two of these variables are tested through a smartphone short panel survey, where 100 individuals living or working in one surrounding southern area of Madrid have participated in entering their travel data for an entire working week. The estimated mixed-logit model that incorporated two “social capital variables: participation in voluntary activities and receiving help for various tasks (i.e. child care) show how people who have less social capital, but that are trying to build it up choose more private than public modes: building social capital stock has a cost in term of time that push people to use more flexible transport mode (i.e. private car), while people who have already a stock of social capital and can use it (i.e. helped people) receive time from others and are more relaxed in choosing a less flexible mode of transport such as public transport. Results confirm that when a new metro station is opened, the shift towards metro is higher in the case of people ”helped” and lower for those participating in some voluntary activities. From a policy point of view, it will be relevant to know if people leaving a specific area are more voluntary or helped oriented, for forecasting the future policies. (Author)

[en] Scholars have been exploring the social impacts of dams for over 50 years, but a lack of systematic approaches has resulted in many research gaps remaining. This paper presents the first systematic review of the literature on the social impacts of dams. For this purpose, we built a sample of 217 articles published in the past 25 years via key word searches, expert consultations and bibliography reviews. All articles were assessed against an aggregate matrix framework on the social impact of dams, which combines 27 existing frameworks. We find that existing literature is highly biased with regard to: perspective (45% negative versus 5% positive); dam size (large dams are overrepresented); spatial focus (on the resettlement area); and temporal focus (5–10 years ex-post resettlement). Additionally, there is bias in terms of whose views are included, with those of dam developers rarely examined by scholars. These gaps need to be addressed in future research to advance our knowledge on the social impact of dams to support more transparency in the trade-offs being made in dam development decisions. - Highlights: • Very first systematic review of the research on dams' social impact • Biases in the literature identified, e. g. large dams over-studied, too much focus solely on resettlement area impacts • Implications of these biases for understanding of the topic are discussed

[en] Metrics evoke a mixed reaction from the research community. A commitment to using data to inform decisions makes some enthusiastic about the prospect of granular, real-time analysis o of research and its wider impacts. Yet we only have to look at the blunt use of metrics such as journal impact factors, h-indices and grant income targets, to be reminded of the pitfalls. Some of the most precious qualities of academic culture resist simple quantification, and individual indicators often struggle to do justice to the richness and plurality of research. Too often, poorly designed evaluation criteria are “dominating minds, distorting behaviour and determining careers (Lawrence, 2007).” Metrics hold real power: they are constitutive of values, identities and livelihoods. How to exercise that power to more positive ends has been the focus of several recent and complementary initiatives, including the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA1), the Leiden Manifesto2 and The Metric Tide3 (a UK government review of the role of metrics in research management and assessment). Building on these initiatives, the European Commission, under its new Open Science Policy Platform4, is now looking to develop a framework for responsible metrics for research management and evaluation, which can be incorporated into the successor framework to Horizon 2020. (Author)

[en] This article seeks to reflect upon the dominant conception of social impacts as the change produced by development projects and programs, and the ways in which those affected perceive and experience them. Identifying change may be a necessary but not sufficient step in acknowledging the complexity of social life. Engaging with critical scholarship produced in the fields of both social impact assessment (SIA) and of the social studies of technical/planned interventions, I discuss how the understanding of social impacts as change responds ultimately to a causal–instrumental logic that, in order to make sense of the complexity of social life, tends to reduce it to a series of variables and matrices. I suggest a complementary dialectical approach focusing on social relations. This approach, allows an alternative means of analysing social impacts concerning the way policies and projects reconfigure conditions and possibilities on a societal level. To accomplish this, and in order to go beyond the sequence of potential impacts (or changes) and their generic indicators, I propose a set of analytical questions that highlight how social relations are structured. Besides, on the assumption that development is both a form of governance and a space of contestation, negotiation, and activism, this approach may contribute to further the potential for reflection and mobilisation that the practice of SIA presents. - Highlights: •Change, which is inherent to social life, is insufficient to determine social impacts. •The critique of causal-instrumental logic provides insights to reflect on social impacts. •Social impacts should rather refer to how interventions reconfigure social relations. •The complex, mutually constitutive nature of social phenomena may thus be recognized. •SIA should go beyond change to the understanding of its socio-political significance.

[en] Currently, in Latin America, 252 million people live in poverty, of which 72 million live in extreme poverty conditions. Hence, it would be necessary to build 22.7 million of homes for all the families in need. The purpose of this project is to describe the different policies designed by the Latin American governments in order to provide a solution to this problem. The cases of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Panama and Peru will be examined, in order to present the main characteristics of the models and instruments used for the housing policies developed by these countries.

[en] As a forum for thought and transmission of knowledge, the university has to develop an important role in situations in which certain vulnerable groups have their rights reduced. This happens with people with disabilities and, in particular, with students who, due to physical, mental, intellectual or sensorial limitations, cannot have access under equal conditions to education. This situation exists at primary and secondary school, where the limitation of human and material resources has often led the transfer of students with disabilities to special educational centers; but it also exists at university. In fact, until recently, most students left university before reaching higher education or shortly after. Fortunately, this context is changing and, together with necessary regulatory changes inspired by the 2006 Convention social responsibility requires universities to take measures in order to guarantee equal opportunities, non-discrimination and universal accessibility -as the LIONDAU prescribed in the past and the Royal Legislative Decree 1/2013 do it currently- in the university educational environment. Measures that must be bidirectional, not only ad extra but above all ad intra, through the appropriate material and formative adjustments at the university. In this sense, the University of Castilla-La Mancha is facing both perspectives, on the one hand, training actions for PDI and PAS to improve the care and support to students with disabilities and, on the other hand, ensuring the socio-occupational training of people with intellectual disability to facilitate their insertion in the labor market. This is the objective of “Incluye e Inserta UCLM” program.

[en] After the deep crisis that the real estate sector suffered in Spain in the last 10 years, market begins to reactivate. This reactivation must face the real problem posed by Rehabilitation and Regeneration of already urbanized and consolidated areas that do not comply with the current demands of today's society.

[en] To participate in social impact assessments, members of a community need to understand both the nature and complexity of impacts at the individual and social level. This study considers the role of engagement in developing community understanding of social impacts by documenting and analyzing organizational and community actions and responses in the Adani Carmichael mine case. Findings suggest engagement facilitates the conduct of social churn. We define social churn as a process of collective level discussion, meaning-making, and consensus-building from multiple information inputs in response to equivocality or uncertainty resulting from organizational behavior, out of which is generated an articulation of community level perceptions of that organizational behavior and its impacts at an individual, community, and societal level. Theoretically, the findings of this study challenge traditional linear notions of social impact assessments and offer an alternative engagement-based model. Practically, the model identifies ways in which organizations can recognize and participate in the social processes that both create and represent the differing levels of social reality determining perceptions of those impacts.