Since the 1970s, land claim and self-government agreements have provided the Inuit in the Arctic with a variety of tools, granting them considerable rights and benefits within their traditional settlement areas. One of the central purposes of these regional agreements was to create an economic base in order to enhance development from within the various regions and thus promote economic self-reliance for the Inuit beneficiaries. This bottom-up approach is a clear shift from the top-down development approach used until the 1960s, encouraging residents and businesses in the regions to partially direct and control their future development, improve their living conditions and strengthen their traditional culture, language, and activities. For the Inuit, this means a constant adaptation to a changing region, both on the political and on the economic level. Moving from living their traditional lifestyle based on hunting, fishing and gathering activities to running multimillion-dollar business operations in only a few decades, is a great achievement for the Inuit in such a short period of time.This project aims at evaluating the bottom-up economic development in two Canadian Inuit regions - Nunavik (Northern Québec) and Nunatsiavut (Northern Labrador). The settling of three land claim agreements - James Bay and Northern Québec Agreement (1975), Nunavik Inuit Land Claim Agreement (2007) and Labrador Inuit Land Claim Agreement (2005) - impacted and changed Nunavik and Nunatsiavut, their residents and communities. Despite being neighbours, the development in both regions was quite different, since the Inuit in Labrador were able to sign their land claim agreement only 30 years after the Inuit in Nunavik.The land claim agreements contained economic benefits that enhanced existing and created new bottom-up initiatives in the private and public sector. The new regional administrations provided for increased opportunities to not only influence regional political and administrative development, but also created employment and income for the residents. Small regional businesses owned by the Inuit in Nunavik and Nunatsiavut increased possibilities to participate in the major economic sectors of the region, like the service industries, mining sector and tourism. As traditional culture, values and languages still have a strong impact on the daily lives of Inuit, a collective approach to development, focusing on benefitting the entire community, instead of an individual has been guiding the majority of initiatives in recent decades. Apart from the small-scale business initiatives of individual entrepreneurs in the regional communities, a variety of larger-scale collective enterprises, like the co-operatives, development corporations and landholding corporations have been created in the private sector. These established their own small subsidiary companies or invested in joint ventures and alliances with other Inuit groups or non-Inuit business partners, and through that developed into major forces in the private sector of Nunavik and Nunatsiavut.The last part of the study analyzes the impacts of these bottom-up initiatives on the community-level. The two regional centres Kuujjuaq (Nunavik) and Nain (Nunatsiavut) have been selected as case studies for this project.
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