I'm sorry, but I'm getting a bad echo on the line now. Anyway, I'll keep going.
I'd like to begin by perhaps following up on your question about dialogue being a risky business.
I think that one issue with conventional impact assessments is exactly that. When indigenous people don't control it, they're in a dilemma because if they engage with it, it can be taken as an indication of their consent. On the other hand, it very rarely is effective in taking into account the issues they have.
I will fill in on a couple of the points. One is the failure to properly acknowledge the importance of indigenous world views, of indigenous understandings of the universe and indigenous expertise. There tends to be a deeply in-built assumption that western science offers the only valid understanding of environmental processes and outcomes. As a result of that, even if use is made of information provided by indigenous people, for example through land-use studies, it tends to be co-opted and presented in a frame that's very much dominated by western assumptions and western values.
Another point I would mention is the failure to use appropriate methodologies for engaging with indigenous people. The very much standard approach in conventional impact assessment is to use meetings in offices, in buildings, to do that in a one-off form so that you come to a meeting, you provide people with information and you ask for their response. For various reasons, that sort of approach is entirely inappropriate. If you look at the way in indigenous-controlled impact assessment is conducted, you see that it tends to have a much broader variety of forms of engagement. It will involve small group meetings, individual meetings. It will involve perhaps separate meetings with men and women. It will involve meetings “on country”, as we say in Australia, in other words, meetings at the places on the land, in the waters, where these impacts are expected to happen, where indigenous people feel much freer and are much better able to express their understandings.
It is iterative. In other words, there will be a succession of exchanges where initial information is provided, people are given time to think about it and come back and ask questions. Further information is provided. You will have this backwards and forwards process over an extended period of time.
I think there are both fundamental and systemic issues in the way indigenous knowledge is treated, and there are a series of very practical issues of what the appropriate ways of engaging with indigenous people are to make sure that they do in fact have a real impact on what is said in environmental impact statements and on the recommendations that emerge from that.