Article on Indigenous People and Collaborative Planning 13.2

Post date: Jun 19, 2012 1:01:01 PM

Indigenous-State Planning & the Evolution of “Government-to-Government” Relations in Coastal British Columbia, Canada

Increased recognition of Indigenous peoples’ rights, title and interests has particular implications for government-based land use planning. It also demands new kinds of institutional arrangements. Not confined to Indigenous-state planning relationships, the need for new institutional arrangements speaks to a much wider issue of how to support and sustain a more collaborative approach to land use decision-making.

In this issue of Planning Theory and Practice Dr Janice Barry asks the question: How do different groups and agencies involved in a collaborative process learn to find and actively create windows of opportunity for the development of alternative planning arrangements?

This case study of the Land and Resource Management Planning (LRMP) process for British Columbia’s Central Coast provides a detailed examination of the rise of a ‘government-to-government’ approach to public land management, involving both the provincial and relevant Indigenous governments.

The article places particular emphasis on affected Indigenous peoples and their provincial planning partners’ growing ability to read and make strategic use of key changes outside the boundaries of the official collaborative process, including changes to Aboriginal law and the rise of an unprecedented coalition between members of the environmental community and the forest industry. These strategic actions helped expand the government-to-government relationship beyond this particular LRMP and ultimately helped secure a long-term collaborative arrangement.

"The plan is always going to be what it is: it's a tool for decision-makers to use. My interest is more integrating how my Nations’ concerns can be brought into that decision-making process. We learned a long time ago that we weren't going to get the verbiage and the policy direction in the plan that was going to inform decision-makers, so we had to build some institutions to work with those decision-makers."

Barry’s paper ‘Indigenous-State Planning as Inter-Institutional Capacity Development’ helps build on both the theory and practice of collaborative approaches to land use planning, in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous contexts, by placing increased attention on how individual collaborative initiatives are situated within and heavily influenced by broader legal and political changes.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14649357.2012.677122

For more information please contact Iain Matthews, iain.matthews@tandf.co.uk