ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief account of subcontracting trends within the oil and gas industry. It describes what Impact and Benefit Agreements (IBAs) are and examines their potential to improve local sustainable development and environmental management in the offshore oil and gas industry in Canada and Greenland. The chapter discusses ways to improve the governance of existing IBAs. Exogenous areas in agreement-making are governance mechanisms that are not explicitly related to IBAs, but nevertheless affect their effectiveness. IBAs in offshore oil and gas projects should be subject to integrated resource planning in addition to long-term community and/or local policy-planning processes in order to make sure that the project is carried out within a previously nationally agreed approach to environmental risk-taking. Long-term community planning and monitoring is significant because most Arctic formal economies are already highly dependent on a single or few commodities. The chapter focuses on environmental governance and issues to do with political autonomy and inequality.
