Presentation short abstract

This paper analyzes environmental impact assessment in northern Canada as both an infrastructure of dispossession and a tool for organizing against unwanted extraction.

Presentation long abstract

Environmental impact assessment in northern Canada emerged alongside the negotiation of comprehensive land claim agreements. Between 1984 and 2006, co-managed impact assessment agencies were established across most of the territorial north. Although framed in liberal terms as a tool for harmonizing Indigenous and settler knowledges, achieving sustainability, and balancing economic, environmental, and social objectives, many Indigenous signatories to land claim agreements understood impact assessment to be a crucial tool for exercising control over decision-making about extractive development in their territories, alongside comprehensive land use planning. In practice, however, final decision authority over extractive development remains in the hands of the state in most areas, land use plans have not been approved, and impact assessment agencies overwhelmingly recommend project approval, even in cases with significant forecast impacts to wildlife, traditional economies, harvesting, and Indigenous rights. This paper analyzes impact assessment as both an infrastructure of dispossession and as a tool for organizing against unwanted extraction. At a time when impact assessment infrastructures are being hollowed out or suspended in service of accelerated project approval, it stakes out a non-reformist reform agenda for northern impact assessment, drawing on analysis of the political-economic conditions under which impact assessment emerged and the conditions under which northern Indigenous organizations have successfully resisted unwanted extraction.