NEGOTIATION
WAVEBREAKMEDIA / SHUTTERSTOCK. COM
In 2015, the Lax Kw’ alaams First Nation in B. C. rejected a billion-dollar offer from the Petronas energy company to build the $ 30-billion Pacific NorthWest LNG terminal on their land – a deal that would have represented more than $ 250,000 for every member of the band.( The project is still under consideration.)
In early 2016, the De Beers diamond company stopped work on Ontario’ s only diamond mine, the Tango extension, after protests from members of the local Attawapiskat First Nation.
The public resistance to Site C, a $ 9-billion hydroelectricity project on British Columbia’ s Peace River, has been strong enough to have a chilling effect on other projects; last May, Northland Power withdrew two major wind farm projects from the environmental approval process; both had been on hold pending decisions about Site C.
It doesn’ t take a public policy expert to see how important it is to win community approval for large-scale resource development projects. Doing it wrong can waste enormous investments in time, money and brand reputation. However, there aren’ t many guidelines for approaching this kind of community consultation.
To address this, in December 2015, the C. D. Howe Institute published a report titled From“ Social Licence” to“ Social Partnership”: Promoting Shared Interests for Resource and Infrastructure Development. Its authors, Dr. Geoffrey Hale and Dr. Yale D. Belanger, both of the Department of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge, identify best practices for successful community engagement around these types of projects.
The researchers examined numerous examples of multi-stakeholder groups and networks, sometimes called synergy groups.
“ The terms vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction; the objective is to bring all those who have an ongoing involvement with the impact of particular projects together,” said Hale.
“ Where the multi-stakeholder group has ongoing value is after the project is approved, and you need someone to keep talking over the medium-to-long haul. It is possible that municipal councils or officials can deal with these things, but in many cases, we have projects that cut across jurisdictional lines,” he said. Multi-stakeholder groups represent proponents and communities within an entire watershed or airshed, while“ corridor coalitions” connect those concerned with infrastructure projects extending across jurisdictions, like railroads or pipelines.
“ What we are seeing with the energy sector is the kind of requirement for accommodation and adaptation that the development sector has been seeing for a number of decades,” said Hale, pointing to“ a need to view the process not as adversarial, but as an ongoing engagement of relevant stakeholders, including communities, municipalities, governments and a
MUNICIPAL MONITOR 13