0
Usenet Posted 23 years ago
Usage

Additionality

Hi

I've come across this word at work in London, in the context of somebody wanting to know what it means. My first reaction was that it is a horrible neologism probably coined by somebody who couldn't express themselves more clearly. A quick search through Google' usenet archive revealed that the word is common in official documents, and could mean something like:

"what you may gain out of doing this project, relative to the (baseline) position you would have been in if you hadn't done the project".

So, generalizing, additionality is possibly a measure of the value of the outcome of a project? Projects with negative additonalities should be avoided, whereas those with positive ones should be embraced. Perhaps additionalities have a subjective element and may be enhanced by the procedure of "sexing up" (vide BBC).

Further reading of usenet revealed that the "principle of additionality" has been used in Lottery funding, and here, it means that any project funded must be additional to a fundee's normal activities and also, that such a project must not have already been funded by other monies from governement sources.

A project will therefore possibly gain in "additionality points" if it is a high risk project carried out by an organisation which had no previous experience in that area of business. The millennium dome in London comes to mind as a possible example of such a project, and it was indeed funded by the Lottery.

Further reading outside usenet, on the web, brought up further examples of government projects where additionality was measured in a multi-dimensional manner, incorporating economic, environmental, social, ecological (and so on) costs and benefits. So additionality could be a new word for what used to be known as "cost benefit analysis"?

So what is the additionality (should I say just additionality or "additionality value"?) of my building a honeymoon hotel with porno cinema and mineral extracting facility on the Moon, using building materials made of highly toxic low level radioactive waste, exported from the Earth?

-- PAB http://homepage.ntlworld.com/libersylvan/
  

Top answer

[nq:1]Hi I've come across this word at work in London, in the context of somebody wanting to know what it ... been in if you hadn't done the project". [/nq] Cheers, Sage

  • [nq:1]Hi I've come across this word at work in London, in the context of somebody wanting to know what it ...
  • been in if you hadn't done the project".
  • [/nq] Cheers, Sage
Free · every Monday

Get the Weekly English Kit 📬

New words, one handy idiom, and a 2-minute quiz — delivered to your inbox to keep your streak alive.

1 Answers
0
[nq:1]Hi I've come across this word at work in London, in the context of somebody wanting to know what it ... been in if you hadn't done the project". (Snip) PAB http://homepage.ntlworld.com/libersylvan/ Sounds frighteningly like synergy and what happened to *it*.[/nq]
Cheers,

Related Questions