Compensating aboriginal cultural losses: An alternative approach to assessing environmental damages

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2008.12.019Get rights and content

Abstract

We first identify six primary problems with conventional practice: lack of context, inadequate participation from aboriginal communities, exclusion of important losses, reliance on market-based measures, neglect of uncertainty, and inadequate treatment of time. We then propose a different approach to compensation, based on insights from the decision sciences and structured decision making. Using case-study examples, we discuss how the proposed approach might address common sources of cultural loss and, in a concluding section, summarize some of the implications for compensation agreements and for environmental management practices.

Introduction

Cultural losses experienced by aboriginal communities are widely viewed as a pressing social issue. Many of these losses are due to environmental impacts affecting land, water, and air resources that are associated with the spread of industrial development over the past 100 years. For some people this issue is recognized as fundamental, with important implications for how society should move forward over the next decades: the unique perspective of Aboriginal cultures, their greater emphasis on sustainability, and the close integration of environmental, social, and economic concerns all speak to a new path forward. For others, the problem of aboriginal cultural losses is viewed as a source of guilt and embarrassment, with implications for how the benefits and costs of past and future resource development on aboriginal lands should be shared. For others, there is no problem: the employment and revenue benefits offered by industrialization are seen to more than offset the environmental and cultural losses related to an outdated, albeit traditional, way of life.

Understanding the complex changes and implications of loss experienced by Aboriginal people is challenging for both native and non-native societies. In this paper we argue that conventional approaches for estimating cultural losses experienced by aboriginal populations are ethically illegitimate, methodologically incorrect, and simply don't make sense. We briefly review the pros and cons of conventional methods and then turn to a different approach, based on insights and techniques drawn from the decision sciences and participatory deliberative processes based in structured decision making (Gregory et al., 1993, Keeney and Raiffa, 1993). We demonstrate the advantages, along with some possible disadvantages, of this new approach using several examples from North American aboriginal communities. We conclude with a discussion of key issues, including the important question of the extent to which compensation is able to address the types of cultural losses often experienced by aboriginal populations in North America.

Our focus is specific to the choice of methods for incorporating cultural losses due to changes in the natural environment. We acknowledge that many individuals—including Aboriginal peoples themselves, along with anthropologists, lawyers, philosophers, geographers, planners, and biologists—have written persuasively and elegantly about the topic of cultural loss in Aboriginal communities.2 We owe them a profound debt, but our focus in this paper is more narrow: We seek to advance an improved methodology for assessing cultural losses from environmental damages in a way that makes sense simultaneously from the standpoint of the Aboriginal communities and from the perspective of governments, policy analysts, and the law. Although much of what we say in this paper will apply to traditional cultures in other countries and to resource-based losses experienced long ago, our focus is on cultural losses experienced by Aboriginal populations currently living in western Canada and the U.S. Pacific Northwest (referred to as First Nations, First Peoples, Inuit or Metis in Canada and Native Americans in the U.S.) who have experienced detrimental changes to their traditional lands and lifestyles.

Section snippets

Cultural losses due to environment change

Throughout North America there is a renewed interest on the part of Aboriginal populations for increased control or self-governance of traditional lands. This takes a range of forms, from outright management of natural resources to sharing in the benefits derived from resource extraction (e.g., jobs and revenues from mining, oil & gas production, forestry operations, rangeland, or fisheries). A spate of new legislation and court decisions echoes and reinforces this interest.

The emphasis on

What's wrong with conventional compensation approaches?

Conventional approaches to estimating cultural losses from environmental damages typically fail to reflect many components of value that matter to the affected indigenous populations. Yet despite widespread criticism, the reliance on market-based approaches persists: we can think of four possible explanations. First, there exists a strong legacy of decisions made by the courts from a time when cultural losses were viewed very differently than they are now. This has led to an unfortunate record

What's right about decision-focused compensation approaches?

A structured decision making (SDM) approach builds on the methods and insights of multi-attribute utility theory (or MAUT) and decision analysis (Keeney and Raiffa, 1993) along with findings from behavioral decision research (Kahneman and Tversky, 2000). The approach provides a way to assess compensation for environmental damages that takes account of multiple dimensions of value and that establishes endpoints that reflect the informed experience of the affected community. As further discussed

Concluding discussion

Issues that arise as part of compensating Aboriginal populations for losses incurred as the result of damages to their resource base are among the most fundamental facing industrialized societies. They reach to the heart of how we define ourselves, as representatives of one culture in relation to another. Compensation helps to affix meaning to this relationship, in a way that is tangible because it involves the possibility of transfers between people of physical things that matter—money, land,

Acknowledgements

Funding for the writing of this paper was received from the U.S. National Science Foundation through Awards SES 0451259 and 0725025 from the Decision, Risk, and Management Science (DRMS) program to Decision Research. We thank Jamie Donatuto, Lee Failing, Michael Harstone, Tim McDaniels, Bill McEllhenny, Terre Satterfield, and Nancy Turner for helpful discussions on this topic. Responsibility for the ideas expressed in this paper rests with the authors alone.

References (45)

  • G. Chapman

    Temporal discounting and utility for health and money

    Journal of Experimental Psychology

    (1996)
  • R. Chuenpagdee et al.

    Environmental damage schedules: community judgments of importance and assessments of loss

    Land Economics

    (2001)
  • A. Cullen et al.

    Uncertain risk: the role and limits of quantitative assessment

  • A.M.H. Debruyn et al.

    Ecosystem effects of salmon farming increase mercury contamination in wild fish

    Environmental Science and Technology

    (2006)
  • J. Donatuto et al.

    Issues in evaluating fish consumption rates for Native American tribes

    Risk Analysis

    (2008)
  • R.W. Eades

    Jury Instructions on Damages in Tort Actions

    (1993)
  • Failing, L., R. Gregory, P. Higgins. A structured decision making framework for adaptive management and meaningful...
  • R. Gregory et al.

    Valuing risks to the environment

    The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

    (1996)
  • R. Gregory et al.

    Using decision analysis to encourage sound deliberation: water use planning in British Columbia, Canada

    Journal of Policy Analysis and Management

    (2002)
  • R. Gregory et al.

    Meaningful resource consultations with First Peoples: notes from British Columbia

    Environment

    (2008)
  • R. Gregory et al.

    Valuing environmental resources: a constructive approach

    Journal of Risk and Uncertainty

    (1993)
  • R. Gregory et al.

    Improving environmental decision processes

  • Cited by (41)

    • A systematic literature review of non-market valuation of Indigenous peoples’ values: Current knowledge, best-practice and framing questions for future research

      2022, Ecosystem Services
      Citation Excerpt :

      The destruction raised calls for AUD $135 million in compensation for cultural loss of the site, which had been occupied by humans for over 46,000 years (Turner, 2020). Despite its potential advantages, several conceptual and methodological limitations may render conventional NMV ineffective, or even unacceptable, in some Indigenous contexts (Adamowicz et al., 2004; Gregory and Trousdale, 2009). Concepts like ‘natural resources’ or ‘ecosystems good and services’, can be incongruent with Indigenous peoples’ ontologies, which often understand landscapes as living entities, with whom humans hold reciprocal relationships and responsibilities (Poelina et al., 2019).

    • Estimating compensation ratios for tribal resources within a habitat equivalency framework

      2021, Ecological Economics
      Citation Excerpt :

      The history, culture, and traditions of tribes, and trust land status of tribal lands all combine to create a setting in which the economic decision-making process from a tribal perspective often does not lend itself easily to adopting the damage assessment tools used in non-tribal settings. Gregory and Trousdale (2009) provide a discussion of several primary problems associated with applying standard non-market valuation methods within a tribal setting. They identify the following issues: the multidimensional nature of cultural losses, which may necessitate varied methods of compensation; inadequate participation due to accessibility issues, or failure to grant the tribe status in the negotiations as befits a sovereign nation; omission or minimization of losses and values important to the tribe; reliance on a market context to value non-market resources; neglect of uncertainty as a factor in developing compensation strategies; and failure to incorporate losses over time.

    • Realising the potential of cultural heritage to achieve climate change actions in the Netherlands

      2020, Journal of Environmental Management
      Citation Excerpt :

      These findings are not widely addressed in the heritage management and climate change or environmental literature or policy documents. Thus, research is needed to analyse the effects of climate change mitigation and adaptation policies on cultural heritage benefits, values and practice by using more culturally appropriate approaches such as values-based and decision-analytic approaches (e.g., Fatorić and Seekamp, 2017b; Gregory and Trousdale, 2009) and evaluate the multilevel actors’ transformational skills and capacities, identify limits and opportunities within existing governance systems and explore dimensions of social and climate justice in enabling transformative change of heritage management and policy in different social and geographic contexts. We also identified positive interrelationships between heritage benefits and heritage management, yet further investigation is needed into understanding the interrelationships between heritage benefits and management and the mechanisms behind those interrelationships.

    • The effect of communication on individual preferences for common property resources: A case study of two Canadian First Nations

      2016, Land Use Policy
      Citation Excerpt :

      However, development can be contested within communities as there are tensions between development goals and the environmental and cultural impacts—thus reaching consensus within Indigenous collectives can be challenging (Wuttunee, 2004; Nikolakis and Nelson, 2015; Nikolakis and Grafton, 2015; Nikolakis et al., 2013). Where development involves natural resource extraction, such as mining or logging, it can create revenues for the community and employment for members, but there can also be important trade-offs with cultural activities, like hunting and fishing and access to culturally significant sites (Venn and Quiggin, 2007; Gregory and Trousdale, 2009). It is this choice between competing alternatives that Wuttunee (2004) describes as a paradox; for as Indigenous groups pursue development to improve their social outcomes there are the inevitable externalities that have social, cultural, spiritual and ecological impacts, which in turn, require further development and income to mitigate these problems.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    1

    Address: 131 Water Street, Suite 208, Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6B 4M3. Tel.: +1 604 228 1855.

    View full text