Abstract Citizen participation should ideally occur as early as possible in a project, especially throughout the course of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) study. In Chile, participation occurs after the EIA study has been completed and presented to authorities for evaluation. However, voluntary early participation has become an extended practice in large mining projects for financial and conflict-reduction reasons. The purpose of this study was to explore a variety of these early participation processes happening in large mining projects from 2001 to 2010 and analyze how well these practices measured up to standards and objectives defined in the EIA and participation literature. Beyond the legal implications of such practice, we sought to understand the role of this voluntary procedure within the EIA process and citizen engagement in projects. We found a wide range of objectives, approaches and results, primarily driven to facilitate approval and implementation of the ten projects analyzed. The underlying objective of voluntary participation processes analyzed (whether it seeks to inform, to note or to engage), determined the information presented, participants included, area of influence considered, time devoted to the process and influence of the information collected on EIA and project mitigation measures. Few of the principles for best practice in the literature were present in the ten projects examined. Moreover, given the voluntary and unregulated nature of these processes, purposes and outcomes were often mixed-up with the Indigenous Consultation required under ILO provision 169, or Corporate Social Responsibility programs. This finally revealed that contrary to expectations, an unregulated and early voluntary participation is not having a clear impact in the definition of projects mitigation measures, participants are at risk of being unsatisfied with the resulting agreements and moreover, it does not assure projects implementation or the avoidance of socio-environmental conflict.

中文翻译：

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智利矿业早期自愿参与环境影响评估的经验

摘要 理想情况下，公民参与应该尽早参与到项目中，尤其是在环境影响评估 (EIA) 研究的整个过程中。在智利，参与是在环境影响评估研究完成并提交给当局进行评估之后进行的。然而，出于财务和减少冲突的原因，自愿提前参与已成为大型采矿项目的扩展实践。本研究的目的是探索 2001 年至 2010 年大型采矿项目中发生的各种早期参与过程，并分析这些实践在多大程度上符合 EIA 和参与文献中定义的标准和目标。除了这种做法的法律影响之外，我们试图了解这个自愿程序在环境影响评估过程和公民参与项目中的作用。我们发现了广泛的目标、方法和结果，主要是为了促进所分析的十个项目的批准和实施。分析了自愿参与过程的基本目标（无论是寻求通知、注意还是参与），确定了所提供的信息、参与者的参与、考虑的影响范围、用于过程的时间以及收集到的关于 EIA 和项目的信息的影响缓解措施。在审查的十个项目中，几乎没有文献中的最佳实践原则。此外，鉴于这些过程的自愿性和不受管制的性质，目的和结果常常与国际劳工组织第 169 条规定的土著协商或企业社会责任计划相混淆。这最终表明，与预期相反，不受监管的早期自愿参与并没有对项目缓解措施的定义产生明显影响，参与者有可能对由此产生的协议不满意，而且，它并不能保证项目的实施或避免社会环境冲突。