In this study, the authors present evidence that the National Energy Board (NEB) does not evaluate whether the duty to consult has been met by applicants or the Crown for the purposes of regulatory approval. While NEB panels do draw conclusions about the sufficiency of consultation, they are not premised on the legal requirements established by the Supreme Court of Canada or subsequent case law. On the contrary, the authors discover that the NEB has approved nearly 100 per cent of the applications in which consultation remains an issue but it relies on three types of justifications for still recommending approval: (i) that it lacks the jurisdiction to consider the consultation at issue; (ii) that outstanding consultation can be addressed through ongoing consultation; and/or (iii) that there are no impacts on rights. Based on these findings, the authors argue that courts should attend to differences over legality and institutional rationality in guiding tribunal authority. In doing so, courts will be in a better position to identify the effect of these differences on tribunal findings, to understand how courts and governments already rely on these findings irrespective of their quality, and to compel transparency for their generation and use.
I argue in this article for the use of a dialogical approach to cost-benefit analysis, which is identified here as a process that rationalizes cross-cultural judging. Weighing in on the Kahan-Sunstein debate about the effect of culture on risk perception, I use economic valuations of Indigenous sacred sites to demonstrate how cost-benefit analysis can misrepresent loss. I identify the way cost-benefit analysis operationalizes preferences that have little relevance for perceptions of substitutability, property, or harm related to sacred sites held by some Indigenous peoples. In doing so, I problematize the use of cost-benefit analysis as a method for ascertaining loss and contextualize risk in the social context in which it is perceived. In order to further procedural justice, I recommend valuation of loss that allows for epistemological disparities in determining rationality. This dialogical approach expects to maximize the accuracy of cost benefit analysis so as to create greater accountability for loss valuation and destabilize formulations of culturally determined preferences as bounded but corrected by expert knowledge.
The United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf is expected to play an essential role in delineating the rights of the Arctic states to seabed resources in the Arctic Ocean. In this article, the authors look to the effect of scientific discourse on Commission authority. The authors argue that in addition to the conferral of its authority by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Commission draws its authority in the Arctic from the way its regulatory frameworks, aimed at containing or closing off disputes about jurisdiction and sovereign rights, correlate with discursive practices used by transnational networks to reach scientific agreement.
The use of rationalized risk assessment to identify the costs and benefits of protecting Aboriginal sacred sites is ubiquitous in Canadian law. Like other contemporary critics of cost-benefit analysis, I voice concerns with its use to adjudicate moral claims and recognize that it can misidentify the depth of loss experienced by Aboriginal peoples when sacred sites are destroyed. Nonetheless, in this article, I question in what ways technocratic approaches to risk could be helpful in protecting sacred sites. The article draws on two recent environmental assessments, the Prosperity Gold-Copper Mine Project in British Columbia and the Screech Lake Uranium Exploration Project in the Northwest Territories, to argue that innovative approaches to characterizing loss illustrate the potential of rationalized methods to identify harm better than it has in the past. The panels’ recommendations to reject the projects, based on the risk that the communities would suffer mental and psychological harm, reflect a genuine effort to provide decision makers with the real cost of approving these two projects. While I do not suggest that cost-benefit analysis can represent the loss of absolute values, I argue that, if done with cultural context in mind, assessment may help to extract the type of information needed to find the depth of empathy from which legal solutions may be constructed.
This paper argues that participatory governance initiatives like co-management can be made effective through agency rulemaking. Using the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board as a case study, this paper affirms that it is possible for marginalized stakeholders to participate in co-management and alter decision-making. By using its formal authority to generate rules that reflect community perspectives, this board contextualized environmental assessment in community-based perspectives. The study of participation presented here illustrates: 1) that a high level of agency support for community participation in rule-making can lead to rules which reflect community perspectives; and 2) that agency implementation of community perspectives has led to the increased use of stakeholder collaboration through private agreement. Nonetheless, the paper also addresses limitations on the ability to translate social needs into privately negotiated agreements where negotiations depart from highly commoditized terms. Consequently, this paper questions the use of negotiated agreements to meet the goals of stakeholder participation, as conceived by deliberative democratic strands of new governance.Dans cet article, l’auteure soutient que le pouvoir de règlementation d’un organisme peut rendre plus efficace de nouvelles initiatives en matière de gouvernance telles que la cogestion. Prenant l’Office d’examen des répercussions environnementales de la vallée du Mackenzie comme exemple, elle affirme que des parties prenantes marginalisées ont la possibilité de participer à de nouvelles modalités de gouvernance comme la cogestion et d’influer sur la prise de décision. En exerçant son pouvoir d’adopter des règles inspirées des valeurs communautaires, l’Office a procédé à une évaluation environnementale en tenant compte du contexte communautaire. L’étude de participation présentée ici démontre: 1) que, lorsqu’un organisme appuie fortement la participation de la collectivité à l’élaboration des règles, les règles adoptées peuvent davantage refléter les valeurs communautaires; et 2) que l’adhésion de l’organisme aux valeurs communautaires favorise une plus grande collaboration entre les parties prenantes, grâce à la conclusion d’ententes privées. Quoi qu’il en soit, l’article révèle également que la capacité d’exprimer des besoins sociaux dans des ententes privées négociées est limitée. Lorsque les négociations dévient des termes hautement standardisés et tentent d’inclure différentes valeurs communautaires, la participation des parties prenantes est restreinte. L’article remet par conséquent en question l’utilisation d’ententes négociées pour atteindre les buts fixés en matière de participation des parties prenantes, telle que les conçoivent les courants de pensée s’appuyant sur la démocratie délibérative au regard de la nouvelle gouvernance.
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