“That’s Our Traditional Way as Indigenous Peoples”: Towards a Conceptual Framework for Understanding Community Support of Sustainable Energies in NunatuKavut, Labrador
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a substantial body of literature in North America regarding the social acceptance of renewable energies, particularly wind energy. However, limited research focuses on the experiences of Indigenous Peoples. Furthermore, several researchers have called for a rapid transition to renewable energies in Indigenous off-grid diesel powered communities in Canada, while limited research has considered local support for this transition, which neglects the Indigenous right of free, prior, and informed consent for developments on or which affect their territories. Working in partnership with nine Indigenous off-grid communities in southeast Labrador, we assess community-member perceptions and support of sustainable energies via hybrid interviews/surveys (n = 211) and key informant interviews (n = 11). Applying directed content analysis and participatory methodologies, we find that five primary themes influence Indigenous support for sustainable energies in southeast Labrador: (1) Community familiarity and understanding; (2) association with previous projects; (3) relationships with culture and sustenance; (4) endogeneity of resources; (5) energy security impacts. The themes should be viewed as a framework for understanding community support, not a definitive recipe for reaching consent. Applying these themes, we demonstrate broad community support for conventional renewables (wind, solar), reluctance towards emerging renewables (biomass, tidal, wave) and energy storage (pumped hydro, battery), and wide opposition for hydroelectricity and small modular nuclear. We demonstrate that energy efficiency applications maintain substantially higher support than most supply-side options. Supply-side sustainable energies have the potential to perpetuate the colonial or extractive nature of resource development in Indigenous communities, while energy efficiency applications more directly facilitate energy security and protect energy sovereignty.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".