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Arctic Yearbook 2014
also a significant impact for indigenous governance exerted by this devolutionary process. The
new devolution act in the Northwest Territories, for example, does away with local land and
water boards negotiated as part of the land claims agreements. The Devolution Act combines all
boards into a single land and water board, made up of members from across the territory. The
rationale is ‘regulatory simplification’, and was first articulated by McCrank in 2008.
Devolution and the deregulation is thus consistent with what could be termed a new neoliberal
approach to Northern economic development, brought to bear by the current Harper
Government. This agenda builds upon what the federal government calls its “Northern
Strategy”, introduced in 2007. The goals of this strategy were articulated in 2009, in Canada's
Northern Strategy: Our North, Our Heritage, Our Future. Cornerstone pieces of this agenda also
include the Economic Action Plan, and the 2010 Northern Jobs and Growth Act. The latter
impacts upon the Nunavut Planning and Project Assessment Act and the Northwest Territories
Surface Rights Board Act, along with amendments related to the Yukon Surface Rights Board
Act. While the intent of the Northern Jobs and Growth Act is partly to meet the Government of
Canada’s outstanding legislative obligations under the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement and the
Gwich’in and Sahtu Land Claim Agreements, it also is very invested in streamlining and
improving regulatory processes in the North – and is therefore very much an outcome of
projects such as the McCrank Report of 2008.
Conclusions
If we return to our original framework – looking at this process of development and devolution
from a ‘Canadian Studies’ perspective, what results is a web of development discourses and
initiatives which are not easily reduced to a single framework of analysis. Development agendas
which create new relationships between citizens, states, corporations, environment and
resources, and responding to a social agenda which increasingly legitimizes and calls for
strengthened indigenous involvement and self-determination. Canada’s Arctic is now looking
very much like many other ‘underdeveloped’ regions – that is to say communities undergoing
considerable developmental pressure while being caught up in a development agenda directed
from distant capitals. Still, the development agenda is intersected by a rising indigenous rights
agenda, strong new voices from a multitude of local, regional and global lobby and stakeholder
groups. It is in this context that we return to the idea of ‘sovereignty’. Indeed it the latter,
‘sovereignty’, which tends to occupy the Canadian Studies literature (Byers 2010; Huebert 2010;
Coates et al. 2008) focus on the north more substantively than ‘economic development’. Partly,
this is because the legacy of Canadian Studies itself has linked political economy to state, and has
either romanticized or villainized resource extraction industries, depending upon whether state
or indigenous interests are described. Berger’s inquiry, for example, seemed to suggest to many
that economic development was not in the interests of indigenous peoples and northerners, and
therefore all development was bad, although this is not exactly what Berger said. This
essentialization and polarization of the two perspectives has left interest in mapping the less
exciting, but more important, minutia of the landscape of development to fewer scholars, like
Campbell (1996), Fenge and Hason (2011), Robidoux (2004), Bone (2012), DiFrancesco (2000),
Petrov (2010; 2013), or indigenous writers whose work is less accessed by mainstream academia.
It also competes with larger nation-building narratives and state agency, particularly in terms of
the state’s colonial legacy – and it is the latter of these that we have found particularly compelling
Economic Development, Indigenous Governance, & Arctic Sovereignty