Session Description
Looking back for the future requires a system lens to entrench IA value, ensuring IA finds its way into decision-making and is accounted for through project lifecycles, supporting successful projects and land use outcomes.
At IAIA 2026, the session, “After the Assessment – Where’s the Value and What Happened in the End?” presented success/failure stories drawing on structural, institutional and regulatory factors that make or break IA value – unintended outcomes and project failures, and liability exposure for the public interest. Case examples included how Indigenous leadership is stepping in to fill IA/CIA regulatory/governance gaps, providing evidence-based structure and integrity; how bolstering public engagement and hearings improve IA outcomes and regulatory integrity; how diagnostics and audits have a critical role in testing IA efficacy; and how institutional blind spots can derail intended IA outcomes – e.g. mining companies and corporate culture that derail the intent of HRIA.
For 2027, we ask why and what we do about it. Looking deeply into regulatory/structural progress and solutions, presenters may consider: how project and/or jurisdictionally specific discussions expose common threads regardless of location or industry sector; how key structural components can build IA value, ensuring outcomes that align with the IA; how structural parts interact, work against each other and how interaction can be progressed. The aim: name the problem and discuss how to build system integrity to achieve the objective of IA, making it an integral risk assessment component that cannot be shortchanged, reduced to a performative construct, or passed over entirely.
Session Summary
Naming institutional blind spots prevents derailing IA value, ensuring IA finds its way into decision-making to support successful projects and land-use outcomes. In 2026, we shared success/failure stories. In 2027, we ask why and how we prevent IA from being shortchanged, a performative construct, or passed over entirely.
Session Chair
Carla Conkin
Lawyer and Roster Review Panel Member/Part-time Commissioner, Impact Assessment Agency of Canada
Canada