With a Licence to Drill

In many societies, the desire to develop extractive industries is a high prior-ity and seen as a guarantee of government revenues and well-being (see Nygaard, 2016). An impact assessment is a part of the opening process of extractive prospects.

The International Association for Impact Assessment (1999) defines such an assessment as “the process of identifying, predicting, evaluat-ing and mitigatevaluat-ing the biophysical, social, and other relevant effects of development proposals prior to major decisions being taken and commitments made”. (Nygaard, 2016)

A prospect’s legitimacy relates to whether the proposed development is ac-ceptable to the society. Anthropologist Brigt Dale’s research on oil extraction in the Norwegian Arctic suggests using Foucault’s concept of governmental-ity, ‘that a process of governing resources becomes one of governing mentali-ties and actions’ (Wilson and Stammler, 2016, 4-5). This implies that energy and mineral companies are not alone in working to achieve a social licence, governmental and local authorities work in concert with private corporations to heighten public acceptance of environmental impacts from the (non-renewable) extractive industries. What mineral prospects has in common is that the surrounding landscape is treated as “externalities”. Here, I insert a long citation from Canada.inc by Deneault and Sacher (2012), to explain the economic term “externalities”, which I find useful for understanding extrac-tion in terms of landscape:

What we need to understand is that public or civic figures in Canada are helping to maintain a powerful taboo on one of the key issues of our jurisdiction: that of “externalities,” defined as the consequences of company activities that are not listed on their balance sheet. In some cases, the environmental, social, political, or cultural damage they cause not only has little if any harmful effect on the company, but ac-tually constitutes the way which the company is able to profit from its reprehensible activities while destroying the environment and bringing disaster to the populations involved. As long as no independent audits are required to assess this kind of damage, there will be no reason to speak of corporate “responsibility” for these companies in Canada.

(Deneault and Sacher, 2012, 31)

The prospector hires consultants to deal with externalities, through the re-trieving of economic, social, geological, hydrological and ecological knowl-edge to support the prospect. For the prospector, this process implies a steep learning curve during the development of the operational design of the min-ing prospect. Much of the academic scrutiny in the social sciences gravitates towards a notion that originates from the mining industry: ‘a social license to operate’ (Prno, 2012). The notion is connected to the framework of corporate

Fig 2.4: Prospective landscapes: Metallic Mineral Deposit Map of the Fennoscandian Shield, Geological Survey of Finland 2013.

The map is a compilation geological knowl-edge from the geological surveys in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and North-West Russia.

It shows that Sápmi is a highly mineralised region. Reproduced with reduced size, and according to GTK’s open product license.

URL: http://tupa.gtk.fi/kartta/erikoiskartta/

ek_085_100dpi.pdf

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responsibility and adherence to governance claims, and relations to affected groups. Espiritu (2015), Dannevig and Dale, (2018) and Johnsen (2016) have all shown interest in “how” mining Nussir ASA worked to achieve social ac-ceptance for the copper mine prospect in Kvalsund.

A social license to operate refers to the on-going acceptance and ap-proval of a mining development by local community members and other stakeholders that can affect its profitability. (Prno, 2012, cited in Nygaard, 2016)

Nygaard’s (2016) comparative analysis of the Nussir case and the Biedjovag-ge case ‘illustrates that the national legal framework regulating Sami interests and planning of mining development remains unclear.’ The critical point, Nygaard notes:

will be to ensure that all relevant Sami interests are considered in the overall knowledge base collected through the EIA-process. This im-plies that the planning authority, the municipality, must have adequate information of not only organized Sami interests, but also interests that have no official voice. (Nygaard, 2016, 23)

Nygaard (2016) focuses in her article three relatively new or revised Acts regulating the relationship between indigenous interests and mining industry.

Around 2010 the Minerals Act, the Planning and Building Act (PBA), the Finnmark Act, and the regulations for environmental impact assessments were revised or new acts. The acts regulate the relationship between the mining industry, the Norwegian government, local and Indigenous interests, and the procedures for legitimate planning, assessment, implementation and closure of mining operations. The Iinternational Centre of Reindeer hus-bandry (ICR) states in a report for UNEP that, even though Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) hold generally high standards in northern Europe, they are widely limited to the individual development projects (Vistnes et al., 2009). It is a lack of coordinating measures. Any planned change of use of outfields in Finnmark County should be assessed according to the Sámi Par-liament’s directive for outfield assessment that ‘[aims] to safeguard the mate-rial basis for, and ensure further development of the Sámi culture’ (Lovdata, 2007a).²⁴ Finnmarksloven is supposed to secure an evaluation of changes in the usage of outfields.

24 ‘My translation of: ‘Sametingets retningslinjer for utmarksvurdering (...) sikre naturgrunnlaget for og sikre videre utvikling av samisk kultur.’