Between ‘best’ and ‘good enough’: How consultants guide quality in environmental assessment

•Practitioners' perceptions of responsibility guide quality performance•Consultants have a strong position for regulating quality and drives the field forward.•Current norms of responsibility and consultants' situation hamper quality enhancement.•Quality performance in EA varies and is open for interpretation.

Quality enhancement in environmental assessment tends to be connected to control mechanisms and best-practice guidelines. This paper takes an alternative approach examining quality performance through the lenses of consultants' perceptions of appropriate action, primarily in relation to the scoping phase. The study builds on interviews with Swedish consultants. The interviews are analysed by using a recently published theoretical framework focusing on practitioners' spaces for action. The analysis reveals that quality is highly open for interpretation and that consultants have a strong position for guiding quality performance, partly due to the key knowledge they hold. Their action is strongly guided by how the consultants perceive their responsibility; requiring a balance between maintaining good relationships with their clients through ‘good enough’ performance and maintaining a good professional reputation by undertaking what they themselves perceive as a ‘best’ practice. These findings indicate a need to reconsider the research in this field, promoting a shift of focus away from the dominance of quality enhancement measures and engage with issues of consultants' and other practitioners' perceptions of their responsibility in respect of quality performance.