Participation or frustration? Local stakeholders and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA): Donlin gold project, Western Alaska

•Identifies tension in NEPA between two of the law's mandates.•Determines that trust between communities and regulators is important.•More scientific studies are unlikely to improve stakeholder satisfaction. This paper examines the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) at the Donlin Gold project in Western Alaska. The Donlin Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was led by the Army Corps of Engineers to inform federal agency decisions about the issuance of permits including a Section 404 Clean Water Act Permit and a Section 10 Rivers and Harbors Act Permit. As is required by the law, the EIS also investigated and disclosed many environmental impacts that were beyond the scope of the federal permits. The Donlin EIS was widely viewed as more detailed than most other EISs. The EIS process also included local tribal governments as cooperating agencies. Despite the EIS's detail and stakeholders’ increased role, many stakeholders felt that these efforts were insufficient. Stakeholders expressed frustration with the NEPA process and the regulators who implemented it. They reported that they felt patronized by a bureaucratic process that focused on fitting stakeholder concerns into technical and scientific disciplines for analysis by outside experts. This study concludes that augmenting the quantity of scientific study, even in response to the concerns of stakeholders, is unlikely to increase local stakeholders’ satisfaction with NEPA. Rather, regulatory personnel must focus on building trust between their agencies and local communities through 1) direct engagement with local stakeholders beyond the one-way forum of public meetings and 2) transparent dialog early in the NEPA process about the law's limitations with respect to turning stakeholders’ concerns into enforceable project requirements.