Consultation Protocols Unilaterally Adopted by Indigenous Communities in Canada
Indigenous peoples in Canada are increasingly developing their own mechanisms to assert their rights and exercise greater control over consultation processes concerning the development of their lands. They are notably developing unilateral protocols to establish when and how they should be consulted. We analyse twenty-two of these protocols to make sense of their legal foundations and purposes. We find that despite their unilateral nature, these protocols follow a relational ethos. Their purpose is to bridge the gap between the communities’ customary law on one side and Canadian and international law on consultation and consent on the other. In doing so, they give consultation and consent rules concrete meaning.