This document is intended for public health authorities who wish to undertake a health impact assessment (HIA) in Indigenous contexts in Canada, practitioners working in the field of impact assessment, and Indigenous organizations that wish to undertake or participate in impact assessments.
Approaches to prospectively assessing the environmental, social and health impacts of policies, programs or projects are increasingly being implemented and standardized in a large number of countries. When these approaches are implemented in Indigenous contexts in Canada, that is, when they involve First Nations, Inuit or Métis, they raise specific issues related in large part to the gap that exists between the worldviews held in these communities and the Western approaches to evaluation that underpin the practice of impact assessment (IA). This discrepancy can be observed, in particular, in relation to conceptions of health, to knowledge systems, to the information used to estimate the e…