| Summary: | Public participation is a key democratic process which can foster meaningful policymaking. Yet, in resource co-management, where natural resources are collaboratively managed by government and local communities, despite the widespread adoption of public participation processes, participation has largely failed Indigenous communities. Failure occurs when communication breaks down; yet, scant research has examined the role communication plays in the participatory processes of Nunavut's co-management boards, responsible for natural resource stewardship and entrusted with including affected communities in shared decision-making. This research examined the ways in which communication influenced public participation in environmental decision-making, and how spaces of decision-making shaped Inuit voice in participatory governance. Using a qualitative research approach, this study’s methodology learns from Indigenous research methodologies, combines a social constructivist lens with a phenomenological perspective and case study design, and adopts a constructivist grounded theory approach to data collection and analysis. Insights were drawn from in-person attendance at the 2020 public hearings on caribou co-management carried out by the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board in Kugluktuk and Cambridge Bay (Ikaluktutiak or Iqaluktuuttiaq) in the western Kitikmeot region of Nunavut, participant observation, literature review, community immersion in both communities over 11 weeks in 2018 and 2020, and 52 semi-structured interviews, including follow-up interviews with the same individuals, across 41 interviewees. Analysis indicated that at the caribou hearings, complex discourses behind communicative practices shaped by Inuit ontology and cosmology, such as silence and performative storytelling, were largely veiled. Governmentality and weaponized bureaucracy, power and colonial relations, and the use of rhetorical strategies antithetical to Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, or Inuit traditional knowledge, further contributed to ...
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