Hierarchization of social impact subcategories: towards a systematic approach for enhanced stakeholders’ representativeness

Purpose: Social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) aims to assess the potential social impacts related to stakeholders over the life cycle of a product or service. For legitimacy and meaningful results, direct consultation of stakeholders ranks among the most recommended approaches. This paper aims to provide the methodological basis for S-LCA to target potential impacts and to support decision-making using this kind of participatory approaches. In particular, the work aims to address some of the limitations of the systematization of stakeholders’ consultation. An approach to facilitate and speed up the access to stakeholders and the construction of respondent panels is proposed. Then, representativeness of the collected answers is verified using a statistical data treatment. The method is applied to hierarchize social impact subcategories in the offshore wind energy sector, a huge up-coming sector in France. This emerging sector raises a number of socio-economic issues that can be related to the development of a new industrial sector and its coexistence with local communities. Methodology: Based on the participatory approach principle, the hierarchization of social impact subcategories is carried out by stakeholders. The developed methodology includes 5 steps. In step 1, the social impact subcategories from the UNEP in Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment of Products and Organizations 2020 (2020) list are adapted to the sectoral context. In step 2, the hierarchization criteria are defined. Instead of using a ranking based on an importance criterion, hierarchization is based on two quantitative criteria to target impact subcategories that are both important and perceived as potentially problematic. In step 3, the stakeholders and a sampling approach are defined. Then, in step 4, an online survey consultation methodology is used and improved for the selection of qualitative variables. Finally, in step 5, the methodology specifies the data treatment protocol. The data treatment protocol in this fifth step aims at addressing the issue of the representativeness and relevance of the responses obtained from surveys. Indeed, hierarchization approaches based on consultations typically consider responses at the aggregated level of the stakeholder category. However, it is likely that different stakeholder profiles of respondents within a large heterogeneous stakeholder category influence the perception of social impact subcategories. To verify this point, it is ne