Session Description
Every impact assessor knows the moment: the design arrives frozen, the assessment begins, and the issue that will kill the project surfaces too late to change anything but the schedule. This session stages that moment as a live game, played twice. A narrator runs a fictional critical minerals mine with a water source whose significance the proponent does not yet know, and the audience holds the power: at six decision points the room votes, majority rules, and the project follows. A live scoreboard tracks months elapsed, money spent, and community trust.
Beside the narrator sits a bench of expert witnesses — a First Nations community leader, an engineer, an impact assessor. No script, no rehearsal: at each decision they answer from their own experience, and those unrehearsed answers are the evidence. Round one runs the conventional sequence — design, assess, consult, defend. The room watches its own votes freeze the engineering before the community's red-line issue surfaces, and the project dies as every practitioner has seen projects die. Round two replays the same six decisions reversed: engagement runs ahead of engineering, the red-line issue emerges in week three as a design parameter rather than in year three as an objection, and the witnesses' answers change in front of the room.
The closing comparison sets the two scoreboards side by side and asks what re-sequencing means for the assessor: engaged from week one, shaping scope while shaping is still possible — what alternatives analysis always promised. Nothing is asked of participants: no preparation, no role-play, no group work. Watch, vote from your seat, and argue in the debrief if you choose.
Session Summary
A live game, played twice. A narrator runs a fictional mining project; expert witnesses answer unrehearsed; the audience votes its fate at six decisions — conventional sequence, then consent-first. No preparation, no role-play, no group work: watch, vote from your seat, and see when the project really dies.
Additional Information
Intended Audience and Expected Interest
The session is designed for the full breadth of the IAIA community: impact assessment practitioners and reviewers; Indigenous leaders and community representatives; regulators and permitting authorities; engineers and project developers; and researchers in social impact assessment, free prior and informed consent, and project governance. Because it demands nothing of its audience beyond a vote, promises a spectacle rather than a workshop, and addresses the sequencing question practitioners actually argue
Session Chair
Anna Quillinan
Spektrum Development
Australia