June 27, 2024 7:00 AM EDTig infrastructure projects in America and around the world have been hamstrung by a history of exploitation and distrust between corporations and local communities, from solar farms in the southwest to fossil fuel pipelines in the Great Plains. A lack of community engagement and local resistance occurred in some 30% of clean energy project failures in the U.S., according to a 2022in the journal Energy Policy.
Canada, with vast resources, large swathes of First Nations reserve lands, and an ugly history of exploitation is particularly well-suited to lead the way on this. But the collaboration also offers hints for energy transition supporters elsewhere: allowing front line communities to own a stake in a project gets infrastructure built faster and with arguably better results for the people who live in its vicinity.
“We're at a point now where in Canada development of major resource development projects requires indigenous inclusion,” says Justin Bourque, who heads Âsokan Generational Developments, an Indigenous-owned firm that consults on partnerships between industry and indigenous groups. “Most of the time, we're now focusing on equity ownership.”
Max Chan, a senior vice president at pipeline company Enbridge, told me how indigenous ownership stakes helped his company emerge from a long history of fractious relations. “It was really the culmination of decades of history and relationship-building, a lot of it, admittedly, we didn't get right. And so we learned from that,” he said. “It was very clear to us that ownership was very important to these communities.
“We're simply not going to be able to deploy clean energy at scale to the mass market unless we have a plan for ensuring that folks have at least a psychological stake, if not a literal ownership stake,” Donnel Baird, CEO and founder of clean technology company BlocPower, told me last year.