Community politics, governance, and land-use planning in Nunavut: Two decades of controversy over the Nunavut Land Use Plan.

Co-management, the concept that natural resource management is more effective and equitable when governments and local resource users work together, has become increasingly institutionalized in the Canadian territories. This thesis looks at one particularly ambitious application of the co-management principle: the Nunavut Land Use Plan process. Despite over a decade of work and multiple drafts, the Nunavut Planning Commission has been unable to create a plan that is close to approval. This failure illustrates a gap in academic studies of natural resource management processes involving the state and Indigenous peoples in Canada. While these have largely focused on the management and valuation of knowledges, the policy development aspect and the actual implementation are equally important. Implementation and policy making remain primarily the domain of the state, and even in cases where policy-makers are motivated by progressive aims, this is not only colonial, but ineffective. Through the Nunavut Land Use Plan process has involved the collection and consideration of Inuit knowledge, and the Nunavut Planning Commission has demonstrated a commitment to planning approaches that limit the destructive excesses of industrial capital, the decision-making process that produces the plan is opaque, centralized and technical. This is a key reason for the failure of the planning process. The colonial-modernist wildlife and human management policies introduced in the Canadian North during the mid-20th century failed, and progressive initiatives run by centralized organizations in the rationalist, technocratic tradition of policy making are similarly prone to failure despite their aims. In places like Nunavut that are sparsely populated and have a strained public service, there needs to be a greater shift towards community-based policy making and implementation. While there are some positive steps in this direction occurring in Nunavut, more resources and capacity should be provided to communities if planners and academics expect there to be policies that respect the knowledges and understandings of communities, or even to simply achieve their intended purpose.

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