Producing consent: How environmental assessment enabled oil and gas extraction in the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut

Abstract

Key Messages • Environmental assessment played an important role in creating the conditions for Inuit to consent to hydrocarbon extraction in the 1980s. • Environmental assessment helped persuade Inuit to consent to extraction by imposing compromises between Inuit and extractive industries. • The extraction of oil before a land claim was settled undermined the ability of Inuit to capture economic benefits from extraction and negotiate ownership over offshore resources. There is now an extensive body of academic literature examining how the environmental movement contributed to the colonization of Indigenous peoples and development of capitalism in northern Canada. This paper contributes to these discussions by considering how environmental assessment (EA) helped enable hydrocarbon extraction in the Qikiqtani (Baffin Island) region of Nunavut in the 1970s and 1980s. When exploration activities began to threaten the Inuit harvesting economy, communities protested with letters and petitions. The federal government responded to Inuit resistance by referring proposed exploratory drilling and extraction to its new EA process. While Inuit won significant victories during some assessments of proposed exploratory drilling and extraction, federal EA ultimately helped create the conditions for Inuit to consent to oil extraction. EA helped impose material compromises between Inuit and hydrocarbon industries, including preferential hiring of Inuit, a reduction in the scope of proposed extraction, and the rejection of especially controversial proposals for offshore drilling. These concessions, combined with a collapse in the market for sealskins due to international boycotts, persuaded several Qikiqtani communities to support oil extraction in the 1980s. The ensuing extraction and export of oil from the High Arctic accelerated processes of colonial dispossession and reinforced colonial political dynamics.

The Duty to Consult and Colonial Capitalism: Indigenous Rights and Extractive Industries in the Inuit Homeland in Canada

“…In both Nunatsiavut and Nunavut, co-management process like land use planning and environmental assessment are structured to impose compromises between Inuit and extractive capital. Th ese processes minimize confl icts between Inuit and extractive industries by rejecting some types of extraction and imposing mitigation measures on others (Procter & Chaulk, 2012;Bernauer, 2020a;Dokis, 2023). However, despite the creation of participatory structures for resource management-and support for extraction-based economic development by most Inuit organizations-colonial patterns of uneven development persist, insofar as many of the long-term economic benefi ts from extraction continue to fl ow out of Inuit territory (Rodon, 2018;Bernauer, 2019), and extractive industries continue to disrupt the resource base that Indigenous subsistence economies depend upon (Parlee et al, 2018;Watt et al, 2021).…”

“…However, despite the creation of participatory structures for resource management-and support for extraction-based economic development by most Inuit organizations-colonial patterns of uneven development persist, insofar as many of the long-term economic benefi ts from extraction continue to fl ow out of Inuit territory (Rodon, 2018;Bernauer, 2019), and extractive industries continue to disrupt the resource base that Indigenous subsistence economies depend upon (Parlee et al, 2018;Watt et al, 2021). Elsewhere (Bernauer, 2020a) I have argued that this balancing of interests is part of a hegemonic form of colonial domination, wherein the state produces consent to the colonial and capitalist status quo, in part by granting concessions to subordinate groups (see for example : Poulantzas, 1978;Chaterjee, 1993). While these concessions sometimes go against the short-term economic interests of some mining, oil, or hydroelectric companies, they nonetheless serve the long-term political interests of extractive industries insofar as they help generate public and institutional support for extraction more generally (Bernauer, 2020b).…”

Imposing calculations: The visibility and invisibility of harm in the Mackenzie Gas Project environmental assessment

“…Discrepancies between wide-spread community consent and input and consent obtained through corporate agreements can be exacerbated because the community is often not informed of the content of the IBA until after an agreement is reached (Kulchyski and Bernauer, 2014;Dokis, 2015;Papillon and Rodon, 2017). Impact Benefits Agreements are often signed after preliminary exploratory work and plans have been already been drafted by proponents and can be seen by community governance bodies as their best shot at ensuring benefits for their people in the face of a project that seems inevitable (Bielawski, 2003;Caine and Krogman, 2010, see also Bernauer, 2020). At the environmental review stage, signed Impact Benefits Agreements are often misrepresented by proponents as demonstrating wide-spread community consent for a project (Dokis, 2015).…”

“…Even as environmental assessments recognize harm stemming from extractive industries, they do so in ways that circumscribe how they can register and reveal particular kinds of logics that serve to justify ongoing extraction and consequent dispossession. Critical environmental assessment literature has described how scientific and technical representations of the impacts of extractive industries have been privileged over other ways of knowing and experiencing the world in ways that have helped to elicit support for resource extraction (Dokis, 2015;Bernauer, 2020;Collard et al, 2020). Critiques of environmental impact assessment reflect wider problems associated with Indigenous peoples' participation in state formulated environmental management regimes including the (mis)integration of Indigenous and scientific knowledges in environmental management (Nadasdy, 1999), the use of traditional land use studies and mapping (Thom, 2009;Nadasdy, 2012;Joly et al, 2018), and the tendency for consultation and other participatory practices to reproduce and further entrench the colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state (Nadasdy, 2003;Coulthard, 2014;Dokis, 2015).…”

“Regulatory capture” and “extractive hegemony”: the relevance of Nicos Poulantzas’ theory of the state to contemporary environmental politics in Canada

“…Elsewhere (Bernauer, 2020), I have shown how the environmental assessment process helped create conditions for Indigenous peoples in the Canadian Arctic to actively consent to oil extraction in the early 1980s. A series of assessments of different proposals for hydrocarbon exploration and extraction imposed several important compromises between Inuit communities and the oil industry, including the rejection of especially risky proposals and a reduction in the pace and scale of proposed extraction.…”