Impact Benefit Agreement Handbook

The purpose of this guidebook is to assist communities and regions in negotiating fiscally beneficial impact benefit agreements (IBAs) that provide a fair distribution of revenues from resource development projects. These revenues may be used to support community and regional (economic) development processes, and to offset potential adverse community impacts associated with resource projects. There are other excellent IBA guidebooks that outline many of the key components and negotiation steps. However, a gap exists in these guidebooks concerning in-depth explanations – and calculations – of how to design an IBA that will maximize the amount of income collected by the community. This guidebook seeks to address this gap by:

1. Summarizing key IBA revenue-generating tools (referred to as fiscal instruments) and their respective advantages and disadvantages;
2. Providing a financial model that can be used to estimate the income that can be expected by a community from alternative fiscal instruments as well as instructions on how to use the model, and;
3. Providing guidelines and strategies for choosing the best fiscal instrument or combination of fiscal instruments (referred to as a fiscal regime) for the community.