The current working paper will focus on Soft System Methodology (SSM) analysis of the process of issuing guidelines for Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) to developers in the Israeli context. The paper’s goal is to make the reader familiar with the terminology and the concepts of SSM, while serving as a case study for practising SSM.
The paper starts with a ‘crash’ introduction to SSM, followed by a general description of the process in the centre of the discussion - the Israeli EIS process. After these two introductory sections, the paper turns to the main issue - a SSM analysis of the problem situation - the creation of guidelines for EIS in the Israeli context.
This specific case study have been selected due to the author’s familiarity with it (is served as the main research field for his MA thesis). Also the author has the shorthand transcripts from a series workshops that were held as part of an evaluation study that the environmental planning department in the ministry of environment (EPD-MoE) have commissioned on the Israeli EIS system.
Unless stated otherwise, the sources for SSM are ‘Information Systems Development: Methodologies, Techniques and Tools’ (Avison and Fitzgerald, 1995), ‘Practical Soft Systems Analysis’ (Patching, 1990), on-line lecture notes for the UCL ‘System Analysis and Design’ course (Sasse and Fultun, 1997) and ‘Soft Systems Methodology: An Alternative Approach to Knowledge Elicitation in Complex and Poorly Defined Systems’ (Finegan, 1994).
This working paper is available as a PDF. The file size is 290KB.
Authors: Muki Haklay
Publication Date: 1/10/1999