Ken J. Caine

Powerful or Just Plain Power-Full? A Power Analysis of Impact and Benefit Agreements in Canada’s North

Impact and benefit agreements (IBAs) between natural resource developers and Aboriginal communities are increasingly portrayed as viable approaches to assure Aboriginal people will reap economic benefits of resource extraction in their traditional territories. Drawing from existing literature about the social context of IBA negotiations, especially in Northern Canada, the authors’ analysis contributes to the study of negotiated agreements by using Lukes’s three dimensions of power to examine how IBAs confer particular advantages and disadvantages to Aboriginal people and proponents of development, thereby distributing power inequitably. The authors argue that, under some conditions, IBAs may provide more direct engagement with industry and a sharing of benefits from resource development than heretofore has been provided in Northern Canada. Depending on the before-, during- and after processes and outcomes, IBAs can also stifle Aboriginal people from sharing information about benefits negotiated by other groups, prevent deeper understanding of long-term social impacts of development, thwart subsequent objections to the development and its impacts, and reduce visioning about the type and pace of development that is desirable.

Cleaver, Frances. Development through Bricolage: Rethinking Institutions for Natural Resources Management

In the last decade many theorist-practitioners of common property resources, environmental governance, and natural resource management (NRM) have proclaimed that NRM is at a crossroads. Indeed many of these same people have written in Society & Natural Resources (SNR) making a claim for resilience theory and adaptive co-management as the way forward to understanding NRM and institutional development. But I would argue that another equally strong thesis has developed from within postcolonial and international development studies and more generally, sociology=anthropology. While for many NRM observers and practitioners a tweaking or correction of such institutions is needed, for others a complete critical reimagining is necessary to address mainstream institutional shortcomings and encompass power, gender, and, more broadly, social justice concerns. It would seem that Frances Cleaver has accepted the challenge. Drawing upon more than 10 years of development research, she has produced a fresh and coherent approach to institutional theory through a critical reimagining of institutions for natural resource management with the recent book,Development Through Bricolage: Rethinking Institutions for Natural Resources Management. The underlying basis for this book is dissatisfaction with the dominant (mainstream, new institutional economics) institutional school of thought as illustrated by the institutional crafting and design principle work of the late Nobel Prize winner Eleanor Ostrom. As a proposed corrective to the focus on rational choice and functional assumptions of institutional crafting within mainstream institutionalism, Cleaver carefully and respectfully lays out an argument for better understanding social and cultural complexity in the way that people understand, utilize, and manage natural resources. Although resilience and social-ecological systems theory provide conceptual tools for new approaches to resource management, they are still ensconced in the mainstream institutional theory of Ostrom and others. Cleaver in response, and more akin with the critical social sciences, problematizes mainstream institutionalism through the lens of what she calls ‘‘critical institutionalism.’’ For Cleaver, institutions with clear roles, rules, and lines of accountability will not necessarily lead to better governance arrangements. Rather, she explores the critical complexity of institutions as

A Review of: “Armitage, Derek, Fikret Berkes, and Nancy Doubleday, eds. Adaptive Co-Management: Collaboration, Learning, and Multi-Level Governance.”

an interesting time in an industry that helps to provide food to millions of people globally. While the narrow scope of the book limits the audience, the relationship between farmers, processors, and scientists, how they worked together to solve problems, and the importance of Extension, outreach, and liaisons among them, is a good illustration of how different groups of people with different missions and training can work together to solve problems and, ultimately, achieve their goals. The lack of analytical rigor means that the book is not suitable for classroom use, although it would be interesting background reading for someone interested in the catfish industry. The book succeeds in that it serves as a springboard for reflection on the relationship between people, resources, and the role of scientists within the development of an industry. Unfortunately, much of the reflection is left as an exercise to the reader, leaving the book frustratingly incomplete.

Introducing Circumpolar Institutes: The Deline Knowledge Centre

Our community of Déline/Where the River Flows, in the Sahtu region of the Northwest Territories, is home to approximately 650 Dene, Métis and nonaboriginal people. It is the only human settlement on Sahtu/Great Bear Lake, the largest lake in Canada and ninth largest in the world in terms of surface area (31,326 km) and volume. Situated within the Arctic Circle, it is the largest lake in the world to exist in a relatively pristine condition despite historical uranium mining impacts. The Sahtugot’ine/Great Bear Lake people have been living with the chronic environmental, health, economic, and social impacts of the mine that operated at Port Radium on the eastern shores of Great Bear Lake. Originally mined for radium in the 1930s and later for uranium ore, all of which was shipped and utilized in the atomic bomb on Hiroshima during World War II, the mine site and surrounding area is now radioactive.