Resource extraction and intersectoral research: Engaging accountable relations in the Environment Community Health Observatory Network

Abstract

The inaugural gathering of The Environment Community Health Observatory (ECHO) Network is a network of academic, non-profit, and health authority scholars and practitioners committed to understanding and responding to the cumulative impacts of resource extraction. The Network is embedded within multiple jurisdictions and institutional contexts, reflecting the Network’s efforts to work across sectors to address questions arising in communities and regions experiencing the overlapping influences of rurality, remoteness, and resource extraction. In this paper, we draw from entrance interviews and a group exercise with Network members to explore the complexity of accountability as an unfolding challenge for research that addresses resource extraction in Canada. We locate these findings within the current settler colonial context in which the Network is embroiled, arguing that a condition of settler colonialism is erasing not only Indigenous legal orders but also accountability mechanisms outside of state-based discourses. In making this argument, we understand settler colonialism as a failed yet persistent project. We contend that collectively engaging through situated and relational accountabilities beyond simply accounting for “accountability”, ECHO Network members—and others looking to social and environmental change—are critically challenged to approach settler-state apparatuses for transformative engagement beyond merely recognizing that accountability is relational.