Interest in cumulative effects management for Alberta’s Athabasca oil sands region can be traced back at least to public hearings before Alberta’s Energy and Utilities Board (EUB) in 1997. Faced with a significant increase in project applications and planned development, key players quickly recognized the limitations of a project-by-project approach to environmental regulation. This broad consensus led to two related initiatives. The first was a process of multi- stakeholder collaboration that resulted in the establishment of the Cumulative Environmental Management Association (CEMA) in 2000. The second initiative was the Government of Alberta’s Regional Sustainable Development Strategy (RSDS) for the Athabasca Oil Sands Area, released in 1999. These initiatives were intended to address the challenges of managing the cumulative effects of large-scale oil sands development by identifying issues, developing work plans, establishing management frameworks, and harnessing the expertise and commitment of government, the private sector, Aboriginal organizations and other stakeholders. RSDS and CEMA also complemented a broader policy on integrated resource management (IRM) that the Alberta Government was developing at the same time. In addition, they were consistent with efforts by the federal and Alberta governments to implement legal requirements and policy statements that required consideration of cumulative environmental effects within project-specific environmental assessment. Ten years after the original impetus for these initiatives, the pace, scale and intensity of oil sands development have vastly exceeded initial expectations and continue to increase rapidly. At the same time, troubling questions are being asked about the effectiveness of both CEMA and RSDS. The EUB has expressed concern about slow progress in generating management frameworks for cumulative effects in a series of decisions beginning in 1999. According to the Board, these frameworks are needed to assist it in discharging its statutory mandate to ensure the orderly development of oil sands resources and to determine whether or not proposed projects are in the public interest.
Participants in CEMA from the federal government, Aboriginal organizations and environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) have also raised concerns about the slow progress of CEMA in achieving tangible results. Possible explanations of CEMA’s performance gap were explored in 16 interviews with participants in CEMA from the Government of Alberta, the Government of Canada, the oil sands industry, First Nations, ENGOs, the CEMA secretariat and private consulting firms. Two individuals from the Clear Air Strategic Alliance were also interviewed.