The study, led by Mekonen Mekasha of Addis Ababa University together with professors Belay Simane and Engdawork Assefa, set out to answer a question that has dogged environmental policy in developing economies for decades: does Environmental Impact Assessment, or EIA, actually change what happens on the ground, or does it merely produce documents? To find out, the researchers deployed a concurrent parallel mixed-methods design, combining quantitative survey data from 103 technical experts working across the road sector with in-depth qualitative interviews of 16 senior officials drawn from federal and regional government agencies. This dual approach allowed the team to measure perceptions of effectiveness statistically while also probing the institutional reasons behind the numbers.

The analytical framework rested on four widely used dimensions of EIA effectiveness. Procedural effectiveness asks whether the legally required steps, screening, scoping, report preparation, review and approval, are carried out on schedule. Substantive effectiveness asks whether the process actually improves environmental outcomes, from protecting watersheds and wildlife corridors to reducing soil erosion along cut-and-fill slopes. Normative effectiveness concerns whether the process embodies values such as transparency, public participation and social equity. Transactive effectiveness, the least studied of the four, measures whether the costs of running the assessment system are justified by the benefits it delivers.

The results revealed a striking asymmetry. Procedural effectiveness scored relatively well: environmental impact statements are prepared, reviewed and cleared, and projects obtain the certificates that allow construction to proceed. But the other three dimensions lagged far behind. Mitigation measures recommended in assessment reports were frequently not carried through into construction contracts or supervision plans. Monitoring of predicted impacts during and after construction was sporadic at best, and in many cases effectively absent once the approval stage had been passed. Public consultation, where it occurred, tended to be superficial, announced late and conducted in forms that gave affected communities little genuine influence over project design or compensation decisions.

Behind these weaknesses, the researchers identified a consistent root cause: governance. Poor governance, characterized by a lack of accountability, institutional misalignment and weak enforcement, undermined the performance of the entire EIA system. The Environmental Protection Authority, nominally the regulator, often lacked the staff, technical capacity and political weight to challenge powerful road agencies. Responsibilities for environmental oversight were fragmented across federal and regional bodies with unclear boundaries, allowing responsibility to slip through institutional gaps. When violations occurred, enforcement mechanisms were so feeble that contractors faced few meaningful consequences for ignoring mitigation commitments.

The Modjo–Moyale corridor makes an ideal test case precisely because of its scale and ambition. Stretching hundreds of kilometers from the town of Modjo, south of Addis Ababa, toward the border town of Moyale, the route crosses sharply contrasting ecological zones, from the Rift Valley’s semi-arid lowlands to fertile highland plateaus. Road projects of this magnitude cut through farmland, disturb drainage patterns, generate large volumes of borrow pits and quarries, and open previously remote areas to rapid land-use change. Satellite-based research on Ethiopia’s broader road investment program has already documented how new roads accelerate agricultural expansion and land conversion, making robust environmental follow-up along such corridors not a luxury but a necessity.

The Ethiopian findings echo a broader pattern documented across East Africa and beyond. Studies in Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and Namibia have similarly reported that EIA systems in the region are procedurally mature but substantively thin, with follow-up and monitoring identified as the weakest links almost everywhere. International best-practice principles for EIA follow-up, first codified by researchers in the mid-2000s, call for continuous monitoring, adaptive management and clear feedback loops between predicted and actual impacts. The Ethiopian case shows how difficult those principles are to institutionalize when the agencies charged with them are under-resourced and politically subordinate to the very projects they are meant to scrutinize.

What distinguishes the new study is its insistence that the remedy is not primarily technical. The authors conclude that the key barriers to effective EIA implementation in Ethiopia’s road sector arise from governance deficiencies rather than from gaps in scientific methodology or legal drafting. Ethiopia has had a mandatory EIA proclamation since 2002, and its assessment guidelines are broadly consistent with international norms. The problem, the researchers argue, lies in how power and accountability are distributed. Improving baseline surveys or adding more sophisticated impact-prediction models will accomplish little if nobody is obliged to act on the findings.

Accordingly, the study prescribes a set of targeted institutional interventions. First, transparency must be strengthened, with assessment reports, monitoring data and compliance records placed in the public domain so that civil society, the media and affected communities can act as external watchdogs. Second, public involvement must move from token consultation to substantive participation, in which community input demonstrably shapes project alignment, mitigation design and compensation schemes. Third, an independent and reliable monitoring system is needed, insulated from the construction agencies it oversees, with statutory authority to halt works, impose penalties and require corrective action when environmental conditions are breached.

The stakes extend well beyond a single road corridor. Ethiopia’s road network is the backbone of a national development strategy that aims to connect landlocked production zones to ports and regional markets, and international lenders including the World Bank and the African Development Bank finance a substantial share of that expansion. If environmental assessment remains a procedural formality, the cumulative costs, degraded watersheds, lost biodiversity, eroded soils and unresolved community grievances, will accumulate silently across thousands of kilometers of asphalt. Conversely, if the governance reforms identified in this study are implemented, the authors argue, EIA could be transformed from a bureaucratic checkpoint into a cornerstone of sustainable development, ensuring that the country’s remarkable infrastructure growth does not come at the expense of the landscapes and livelihoods it traverses.

Subject of Research: Effectiveness of Environmental Impact Assessment in Ethiopian road infrastructure projects

Article Title: Environmental Impact Assessment Effectiveness in Ethiopian Road Infrastructure Projects: Evidence from the Modjo–Moyale Interregional Road Corridor

Article References: Mekasha, M., Simane, B., & Assefa, E. (2026). Environmental Impact Assessment Effectiveness in Ethiopian Road Infrastructure Projects: Evidence from the Modjo–Moyale Interregional Road Corridor. Environmental Management, 76(10), Article 323. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-026-02594-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00267-026-02594-y

Keywords: environmental impact assessment, Ethiopia, road infrastructure, Modjo–Moyale corridor, governance, environmental management, public participation, monitoring, sustainable development, East Africa, institutional capacity, environmental policy

The study, authored by Brady Kennedy of Columbia University’s Department of Sociology, Cristian Capotescu of Columbia’s Trust Collaboratory, and Jennifer Laird of Lehman College, challenges the prevailing assumption that trust in smart city technologies can be engineered through better privacy protections, more reliable sensors and clearer communication. Drawing on a thematic synthesis of sociological research on trust alongside the literature on public participation, the authors contend that trust is not an attitude stored in the minds of individuals and measured by surveys, but a property of ongoing social relations between residents and the experts and institutions behind these initiatives.

Smart city initiatives typically combine several layers of technology: distributed sensors and connected devices grouped under the heading of the Internet of Things, which collect data from the built environment; information and communication technologies and cloud computing, which transmit and process that data at scale; and increasingly, artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making, which translate the resulting data into classifications and predictions for operational use. Stated aims range from optimizing public services and improving environmental sustainability to making infrastructure more accessible and cities safer and more livable.

Much existing research on trust in smart cities operates within a risk-benefit logic. Scholars have produced testable models simulating how mistrust hinders deployment, measured public attitudes through surveys, and proposed lists of trust characteristics such as privacy, reliability and fairness that designers can integrate into systems. The assumption is that as initiatives follow prescribed security parameters, privacy standards and governance norms, and communicate those choices transparently, public trust will follow. Kennedy and colleagues call this a technology-centric view that treats trust as flowing in one direction, with the public asked to extend it according to how experts adjust technical features.

In contrast, recent sociological scholarship, particularly from the field of science, technology and society, understands trust as inherently relational. In this account, trust emerges from interactions between trustors, the people doing the trusting; trustees, those in whom trust is placed; and trust objects, the specific focus of the relation at a given time and place. A smart city initiative may be the object of a trust relation, but it is never the trustee: residents extend or withhold trust with respect to the agency, vendor or partnership that designs and operates the system. Crucially, because uncertainty is what makes trust necessary in the first place, its conditions can never be fully engineered away through technical decisions.

The authors further draw on work describing trust as a verb, an active practice of trusting. Trusting is a skillful evaluative process in which residents scrutinize information and conduct rather than placing blind faith in experts. This carries a demand for both sides: the trustor must do the work of assessment, and the trustee must render itself answerable to that scrutiny. Because the trustee in these relations is an institution whose authority is itself at issue, answerability requires that decisions, and the power behind them, be made contestable. Notably, the authors argue that mistrust is not a failure of trust-building but internal to the same relational ties, playing an important role in promoting accountability and public engagement.

From this foundation, the study develops a typology of three participatory roles: the public as co-accessors, co-collectors and co-designers. Each role names the position residents occupy relative to smart city experts, and, because a relation cannot be specified from one side alone, also names what experts must place at stake. As co-accessors, residents shape, monitor and contest how data is gathered and used, while institutions accept the vulnerability of scrutiny. Examples range from static open data dashboards such as London’s DataStore to deeper arrangements like Barcelona’s New Data Deal, which re-envisions collected data as a public commons, and Manchester’s data governance practices, where residents and policymakers negotiate data gathering within structured engagements.

As co-collectors, residents directly produce data for smart city systems, through passive smartphone sensing or active crowdsourcing, while experts accept dependence on evidence they did not themselves produce. The MiraMap platform in Torino, Italy, allows residents to report and track urban problems, research showing it increased trust in government and technology alike. At the furthest extent, residents deploy their own sensors through systems such as HabitatMap AirSense and AirBox to generate environmental evidence independent of official accounts, converting mistrust into an instrument of accountability. As co-designers, finally, residents participate in shaping what is built, with experts relinquishing exclusive control. Iterative workshop approaches that visibly incorporate resident feedback have been shown in follow-up surveys to increase community trust in both the technology and the researchers, while game-based and virtual reality formats help include elderly and non-technical participants.

The framework carries pointed lessons for practitioners. Tokenism and consultation that leave residents feeling passively managed are not failures of technique but interactions in which no reciprocity was established; the mistrust that follows is a proportionate response, as illustrated by the urban data trust proposed for Sidewalk Toronto, constituted by the operator on the operator’s own terms, which failed to generate the mutuality on which trusting depends. The authors also caution that participatory approaches do not encounter a ready-made public but bring one into being, and that formats demanding time, mobility and technical confidence tend to reproduce existing inequalities, underrepresenting marginalized groups. Compensation and trusted community intermediaries can help widen who participates.

Ultimately, the authors argue, smart city professionals should stop treating participation as an instrument for raising approval scores and start treating it as the intentional structuring of reciprocal interaction in which trust, and mistrust, can both operate productively. There is no single modality for building trust, and each initiative will pose context-specific challenges. But without a relational understanding in which experts make themselves genuinely answerable, they warn, even well-intentioned future initiatives will face the same public backlash that has already derailed smart city projects from Toronto to San Diego.

Subject of Research: Trust-building through public participation in smart city initiatives

Article Title: Reframing participatory approaches to the smart city as opportunities for trust-building

Article References: Kennedy, B., Capotescu, C., & Laird, J. (2026). Reframing participatory approaches to the smart city as opportunities for trust-building. Discover Cities, 3(1), Article 177. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00352-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44327-026-00352-7

Keywords: smart cities, public trust, public participation, sociology of trust, STS, expertise, data governance, participatory design, citizen sensing, urban technology, co-design, mistrust