Indigenous Governance and Blue Finance in Canada

For most of my career in financial services, the sequence for getting something financed did not change much. You structure the instrument, you line up the incentives, and the capital follows. Most of the risk work lived inside that sequence: assess the borrower, price the exposure, set the terms, watch the outcome. Carried over to the ocean, the same logic suggests that if you design the right bond structure and align the right policy incentives, capital will move toward the outcomes the ocean needs. That logic is not wrong. In Canada, it is incomplete. The path to ocean outcomes here runs through Indigenous governance, and that single fact changes how blue finance has to be built to work.

This is a structural claim, not a moral one. It describes how marine conservation decisions are actually made in this country today, and what the record shows about which arrangements endure and which come apart. I am not arguing that capital should defer to Indigenous governance because it is right to do so, though there are good reasons to think it is. I am pointing out that, in Canada, the deals that have lasted were built this way, and the ones that skipped it mostly were not built at all.

The evidence sits in how Canada's most significant ocean conservation initiatives have been designed in the past decade. Take the Great Bear Sea Project Finance for Permanence, which closed in 2024 with $335 million in new investment. The Indigenous governance in that arrangement was not a condition attached to a financing deal. The financing was assembled around the governance. Coastal First Nations sit at the centre of the structure, and the stewardship programs, the Guardian roles, and the conservation planning all run through governance that those nations control. The capital is there to serve that governance. It was never the reverse.

The Tallurutiup Imanga agreement in the eastern Arctic was built on the same idea. The Qikiqtani Inuit Association is a co-governing authority in that marine protected area, not a stakeholder consulted on a plan drawn up elsewhere. Its role is constitutive. The stewardship program that employs Inuit community members as marine monitors is part of the governance through which the protected area functions, not a benefit added at the end. Remove that program and the arrangement stops working.

Coast Funds makes the same point from the capital side. It manages conservation financing for First Nations across coastal British Columbia, working as an Indigenous-led allocator that directs endowment income and partner contributions toward stewardship priorities the communities set for themselves. The governance comes first and decides where the money goes. The fund was created to serve that order, not to soften it.

Three arrangements, one feature in common. In each, Indigenous governance is not an input into a process that someone else designed. It is the process. For anyone moving capital, that distinction is decisive, because the familiar sequence of identifying a project, structuring an instrument, and then seeking community consent runs close to backwards from how the durable Canadian examples were actually built. Consent, in the familiar model, is the final gate. In these examples, governance is the ground the whole structure stands on, and it is present from the first conversation.

The law points in the same direction. Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 recognizes and affirms existing Aboriginal and treaty rights. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, in force federally since 2021, commits the government to work in consultation and cooperation with Indigenous peoples to bring federal laws into line with the Declaration. In British Columbia, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act has been in force since 2019 and makes explicit room for agreements that establish shared or consent-based decision-making. These are working law, not statements of intent, and they set the framework within which any serious ocean conservation or blue finance initiative in Canada now proceeds.

That framework also reframes consent. In the older model, consent is something capital secures near the end, a signature that releases a structure already designed. The direction of Canadian law, and of the arrangements that work under it, treats consent as something that informs the structure from the outset, carried through governance and not appended to it once the terms are set.

The practical implication is demanding without being complicated. Capital meant to produce ocean outcomes in Canada has to work inside Indigenous governance frameworks from the beginning, before the instrument is designed. That calls for engaging rights-holder organizations early and treating their decision-making as part of the deal itself. It calls for governance diligence carried out with the same seriousness a lender brings to credit diligence: who holds authority, how decisions get made, and on what timeline. And it asks capital to accept a pace it is not used to, because a fundable project will move at the speed of community process and constitutional authority, which seldom matches a closing calendar set in a boardroom.

It follows that benefit sharing and stewardship employment are not terms to be negotiated at the margin, late in a process, as a way of buying goodwill. In the arrangements that have held, they are central, written into the structure because the structure is a governance structure first and a financing structure second. The Guardian programs, the monitoring roles, and the planning capacity these deals fund are the means through which the governance operates day to day. Cut them to economize and you have not produced a leaner deal. You have removed the part that made it work.

There is a risk argument underneath all of this that I find more convincing than any appeal to principle, and it is why I think this should concern capital and not only communities. Governance that sits outside a deal is a standing risk to that deal. It can withhold, contest, or litigate, and when it does, the financial structure resting on top of it is exposed. Governance that is internal to a deal, that the deal exists to serve, is far steadier, because the people with the authority to halt it are the same people whose priorities it carries forward. In ordinary risk terms, the governance-first model is not the soft option. It is the more durable one. The Great Bear Sea PFP, the Tallurutiup Imanga stewardship model, and Coast Funds have each absorbed the demands of that model and produced arrangements built to last for decades. The projects that treated Indigenous governance as a late-stage approval have tended to produce announcements, and then very little.

None of this makes blue finance in Canada impossible. It makes it slower, more deliberate, and more demanding of the people who structure the capital. For a field still working out its Canadian identity, that is a clear signal and a useful one. Blue finance here will not scale on instrument innovation alone. It will scale when the governance through which ocean decisions are made is understood and respected by the capital that wants to support those decisions, and built into the structure from the first conversation. That sequence is not a courtesy. It is the condition every durable arrangement has already met.