This Standard strengthens the quality, credibility, and usefulness of impact assessment reports across sectors — and serves as a guide for better design of social and environmental projects from the outset.
This Standard has been developed with an objective to strengthen the quality, credibility, and usefulness of impact assessment reports across sectors. Increasingly, civil society organizations, companies, impact investors, multilateral organizations and governments seek to understand the social, environmental, and economic impact created through interventions. However, inconsistencies in methodologies and reporting practices limit better understanding and effective decision-making.
Beyond improving reporting quality, this Standard could also serve as a guide for better design of social and environmental projects. By emphasizing clarity of purpose, stakeholder engagement, methodological strength, ethical considerations and evidence-based reasoning, the Standard helps practitioners think rigorously and holistically about how interventions are structured, implemented, and evaluated — ensuring that impact considerations are embedded from the design stage rather than retrospectively.
This Standard establishes a shared language and principles-based approach to impact assessment. The Impact Assessment Accreditation Forum (IAAF) will apply this Standard to review, provide structured feedback, and grant accreditation to impact assessment reports. Through this process, IAAF seeks to enhance the quality, credibility, and usefulness of impact reporting across sectors. The accreditation process is designed both as an evaluative mechanism, and as a developmental tool, enabling organizations to strengthen their reporting practices as well as the design and implementation of their social and environmental initiatives.
The Standard is informed by the following guiding philosophy:
Accordingly, this is a principles-based standard, supported by guidance rather than prescriptive checklists.
While the principles are presented as distinct components of the Standard, in practice they are inherently interconnected and may overlap in their application. Impact assessment is a holistic process, and aspects such as stakeholder engagement, materiality, methodology, and evidence often inform and reinforce one another. Users of the Standard are therefore encouraged to recognise that the same element of a report may address multiple principles. The intention is not to create rigid silos, but to ensure comprehensive and coherent assessment — with emphasis on the overall integrity, consistency, and quality of the assessment process rather than segmentation.
The assessment report shall be anchored in a clearly articulated project purpose and causal logic. A well-defined problem statement, explicit objectives, and a structured theory of change enable practitioners to map how inputs and activities are expected to lead to outputs, outcomes, and long-term impact — with space for explicit assumptions and external factors.
The impact assessment report shall clearly articulate the local social, cultural, economic, and ecological realities in relation to the specific project — including how different stakeholder groups may be affected, with attention to vulnerable or marginalized groups whose voices are often underrepresented.
Impact assessment methods used shall be fit-for-purpose, transparent, and defensible — aligned with the purpose of the assessment and the nature of the intervention. There is no single correct method; methods shall be selected based on the questions asked, the context, and available resources, with limitations and biases explicitly acknowledged.
The depth and scope of impact assessment shall be proportionate to the scale, complexity, and risk profile of the intervention. Indicator selection shall be based on materiality principles — focusing resources on what truly matters and ensuring conclusions are supported by appropriate levels of evidence.
Findings shall be supported by reliable and traceable evidence. The report shall show clear linkages between data, analysis, and conclusions, with transparency about data gaps, uncertainties, and limitations, and justified use of indicators and proxies.
The report shall responsibly address causality without over-claiming impact. Claims about change shall be grounded in plausible reasoning, with consideration of counterfactuals, alternative explanations, and a clear distinction between outputs, outcomes, and impacts.
Impact assessment shall respect rights, dignity, safety, and agency, and uphold ethical integrity throughout the assessment lifecycle — including informed consent, confidentiality, do-no-harm safeguards for vulnerable groups, conflict-of-interest disclosure, and no plagiarism.
The impact assessment report shall support learning and improvement, not just accountability — including reflection on what worked, what did not, and why, adaptive changes during implementation, and learning relevant for future programming.
Impact reporting shall enable public scrutiny and trust. Reports shall be clear, accessible, and open to scrutiny — structured so diverse audiences can understand findings without oversimplification, with willingness to place the report in the public domain.
Each principle is scored on a 0–10 scale during IAAF accreditation reviews. This operational scoring framework supplements the Standard; thresholds and weights apply to Levels 3–4 accreditation.
Methodology, evidence, and causality carry the highest weight — reflecting that the credibility of findings depends most heavily on these foundations.
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