This study aims to investigate environmental assessments (EAs) as a factor in the learning process, both within organizations that elaborate the EAs and those interested in or affected by them. Environmental assessments are tools used in the search for sustainability of human interventions that offer ecological risks. By involving people and knowledge, EAs can result in learning outcome gains. Participation in EAs and/or access to their information products can promote learning in different dimensions, levels and types, with many potentially positive effects for organizations. The openness and encouragement that EAs can grant to public participation is one element that affects the exchange of knowledge between scientists and social actors and, therefore, the intensity of learning. The creation of memory repositories associated with EAs can support learning in organizations and enable the development of new EAs with the use of knowledge obtained from previous experiments.
Environmental assessment; Knowledge; Organizational learning; Sustainability; Sustainable development
