The extractive industries, including
mining, oil and gas, continue to have large-scale and systemic impacts on
indigenous peoples and local communities that live on or near such projects.
Communities, whether they seek to resist the entry of extractive industries on their
lands – due to the well-known history of gross violations of their rights as a
result of mining activities or due to lack of obvious benefits – or whether
they seek to cooperate with the hope of obtaining some benefits, will usually interact
with companies in some form or another.
Over the past years companies and
communities have increasingly engaged through amicable means. These types of ‘community-company
engagements’ have taken a broad range of interactions inducing dialogue
throughout a project’s life cycle, including specific negotiations, agreements
and accompanying mechanisms such as grievance mechanisms and development funds.
This paper by Marie Wilke, Laura Letourneau-Tremblay and Stephanie Booker seeks to examine community-company engagement through
the lens of communities that, for a variety of reasons, struggle to engage with
companies and who seek to use these types of agreements to formalize their role
in the process, to obtain clear commitments on key points such as the scope of
impact assessments, to draw up mechanisms that can address potential conflicts
and to set the stage for more comprehensive socio-economic participation
negotiations at a later stage.
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