From an instrumental or management perspective, impact assessment (IA) is a process of identifying impacts, finding solutions and achieving project approval. A recipient community, however, has a completely different perspective. For them the IA is about living with impacts, individually and collectively, perhaps over generations, and contested processes of self-determination, consultation and exclusion. IA practitioners live in a third space, usually bound to the proponent but also aware of responsibilities to communities and eco-systems. Seeking to better understand how IA is practiced and experienced, we explore the proposed Wafi-Golpu mine, located in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea. Determinably focused on local effects we situate the proposed mine within the context of the national mining experience and discuss how IA practices see local and/or Indigenous communities. We find that the Wafi-Golpu IA is blind to local ways of being and seeing the world, with an opaque and arbitrary assessment that reflects its technical and Western basis and bias. We finish with observations about the proposed Wafi-Golpu mine and IA that is relevant to the approval process, as well as making a decolonial, Southern contribution to IA theory and practice, extractive industry regulation and mining-affected communities elsewhere.

从工具或管理的角度来看，影响评估（IA）是识别影响，找到解决方案并获得项目批准的过程。但是，接收者社区具有完全不同的观点。对于他们来说，保险业监督是指可能会历经几代人的个人和集体，以及充满争议的自决，协商和排斥过程。IA执业者生活在第三空间，通常与支持者绑定，但也意识到对社区和生态系统的责任。为了更好地了解IA的实践和经验，我们探索了拟建的Wafi-Golpu矿，该矿位于巴布亚新几内亚的莫罗贝省。我们将确定的重点放在当地的影响上，将拟议的矿山置于国家采矿经验的背景下，并讨论IA做法如何看待当地和/或土著社区。我们发现，Wafi-Golpu IA对本地的存在和观察世界视而不见，其评估不透明且武断，反映了其技术和西方基础及偏见。最后，我们将对拟议的Wafi-Golpu矿山和IA进行与批准流程相关的观察，并对南部地区的IA理论和实践，采矿业监管以及其他地区受采矿影响的社区做出非殖民化的南方贡献。