ID: 1876
Presenting Author: Courtney Squires
Session: 676 - Public Trust and Social Impact Assessment: Lessons learned from major projects
Status: pending
By elevating socio-economic monitoring as a core component of the social impact assessment process, proponents, governments, Indigenous governments, and communities can strengthen public trust.
Economic benefits—such as jobs, business opportunities, and social investments—are often the main reasons stakeholders and rightsholders support major projects. Yet, communities increasingly question whether these projected benefits are fully realized and whether they outweigh the negative social impacts. This skepticism is largely due to the complexity of predicting social impacts, especially when recent, relevant, or comparable data is lacking or difficult to access in order to support reliable assessments.
Socio-economic or community effects monitoring, which involves collecting and analyzing information to understand how activities affect social and economic conditions, is not currently applied consistently across Canada or internationally. In Nunavut, mining companies are required by the Nunavut Agreement to implement comprehensive, project-level socio-economic monitoring programs to regularly evaluate the accuracy of predictions and understand the real effects of projects.
Alongside many commercial and regulatory drivers, socio-economic monitoring can strengthen public trust in the assessment process. Drawing on ERM’s experience conducting monitoring, we will explore how this practice can add value in other jurisdictions and contexts for communities, proponents and governments. We will also bring lessons learned on best practices for developing and implementing socio-economic monitoring programs, including the use of consistent and available data, integration of Indigenous knowledge and worldviews into the analysis, and the use of multi-party collaboration models.
Courtney is a Principal Consultant with ERM, specializing in mining and social performance.
Coauthor 1: Sophie Wirzba