Perceptions of reclamation success as “as close as possible to the pre-mining state” undermine public participation and Indigenous consent in mineral governance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indigenous peoples and local communities in mineralized regions are under increasing pressure to support mining on their lands. The promise of reclamation is commonly used to help secure support for a project, yet proposed reclamation outcomes are often vague during impact assessment. We asked how local understandings of reclamation success interact with deliberations on whether to support a proposed mine through a case study in the Yukon Territory, Canada. We conducted a qualitative content analysis of written submissions by Yukon people and organizations to public engagements about mining from 2010 to 2021. We found Yukoners require “proper” reclamation for approval of mining and conceptualized success as “as close as possible to the pre-mining state”. We problematize the concept of “reclamation as reversal” as it (falsely) implies that mining is a reversible process. We further demonstrate how reclamation as reversal appears ethically responsible but constrains Indigenous self-determination in decision-making and can create artificial agreement on goals. We conclude that a robust understanding of realistic reclamation outcomes is required during impact assessment for meaningful public participation and for Indigenous peoples to provide/withhold consent. To achieve this, local engagement on reclamation must be premised on transformational change to landscapes, not a return to a past state.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".