Empowered Co-Management: Towards Power-Sharing and Indigenous Rights in Clayoquot Sound, BC

Abstract

This article reports and takes up Aboriginal perspectives on co-management that highlight the intrinsic linkages between the environmental and socio-political dimensions of natural resources. In doing so, it explores the capacity of comanagement to address Aboriginal claims for self-determination and increased control over traditional territories within liberal democratic state systems. Analysis of the Interim Measures Agreement between the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations and British Columbia demonstrates how co-management involving Aboriginal peoples in a negotiated framework of substantive power-sharing provides a venue for augmented levels of confidence in indigenous-state decision-making processes. Additionally, it advances Aboriginal participants' rights claims against the state. Negotiating such "empowered" co-management represents a positive shift in relations between indigenous peoples and governments within settler states in the absence of constitutional change.