The politics of planning: assessing the impacts of mining on Sami lands

Abstract

This article examines the implications of undertaking community-based impact assessment (CBIA) in the Swedish context where Indigenous rights receive little recognition and the institutional planning environment is disenabling. It explores how normative biases built into the permitting process for mines ontologically privilege non-Indigenous ways of defining what constitutes relevant impacts. We show how the CBIA, undertaken by an impacted Sami community together with the authors, attempted to challenge these biases by constructing narratives about future impacts from the perspective of the Indigenous community. We also discuss how the research itself became embroiled in contestations over what constituted legitimate knowledge.