Black-boxing Sustainable Development: Environmental Impact Assessment on the River Uruguay

Abstract

Over 40 years of diffusion worldwide, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has acquired an authoritative governance script that says that part of the decision-making process about the licensing or the funding of territorial development projects can be delegated to the instrument. Inscribed in applicable planning and development (hard and soft) law, regulations, and general technical reference documents, EIA affords its use for legitimizing and challenging decisions where a balance between competing environmental and developmental interests is to be struck. Initially associated with information provision for ecologically rational planning, EIAs became enshrined as a means, and ultimately a condition, for the substantiation of sustainable development and participatory governance, whatever these may mean (Cashmore et al. 2007).