Why Industry Should Stop Calling Its Claims “Impact”
Reframing Social and Indigenous Reporting Around Opportunity, Benefit, and Authority
Over the past decade, the language of “impact” has become ubiquitous across corporate reporting, finance, infrastructure, and procurement. Companies now routinely claim to measure and report their social impact, Indigenous impact, or community impact—often with polished dashboards, standardized indicators, and carefully worded narratives.
Yet beneath this apparent sophistication lies a fundamental conceptual error.
Industry does not create social or Indigenous impact. It can only create the conditions under which impact may occur. Impact itself—whether positive, negative, or mixed—is experienced, interpreted, and ultimately defined by communities, workers, and rights-holders. To claim otherwise is not merely imprecise; it is a quiet assertion of authority that does not belong to industry.
This article argues that in social and Indigenous domains, the term impact reporting is misapplied. What industry can credibly report on are opportunities offered and benefits contributed—inputs and proximal outcomes that sit within its control. Impact, by contrast, is an emergent, community-defined phenomenon. It is relational, contextual, and normative. It cannot be self-declared by the actor that initiated the activity.
If the field of social and Indigenous reporting is to regain credibility, it must begin by correcting this category error.
Impact Is Not an Input
In business and policy contexts, the word “impact” is often used loosely to describe anything downstream of an activity: jobs created, dollars spent, programs funded, or infrastructure built. But this usage collapses distinct concepts into a single, misleading term.
Impact is not an input.
It is not a transaction.
It is not a line item.
Impact is an effect experienced by others, interpreted through their own values, priorities, histories, and aspirations. It is not inherent in an activity itself.
Consider a procurement contract awarded to an Indigenous-owned business. From the perspective of the company issuing the contract, this may be framed as a positive Indigenous impact. From the perspective of the business owner, it may represent opportunity, risk, growth, or burden. From the perspective of the broader community, it may be seen as transformative, marginal, or even harmful—depending on distribution, governance, and context.
The same activity can generate different impacts for different people, simultaneously.
This is not a flaw in measurement. It is the nature of social reality.
Control Defines What Can Be Reported
A useful principle for any reporting regime is control: an organization should only make definitive claims about what it controls.
Industry controls:
procurement policies and scope design
hiring practices and job conditions
capital deployment and contributions
contract terms and supplier selection
timelines, budgets, and delivery mechanisms
Industry does not control:
how opportunities are taken up
how benefits are distributed within communities
whether employment leads to long-term wellbeing
whether revenues translate into community priorities
how historical, cultural, or social dynamics shape outcomes
Yet much of what is currently labeled “impact” reporting consists of organizations describing activities and then attributing downstream social meaning to them—often without the consent, validation, or participation of those affected.
This is not neutral language. It is an implicit claim to interpretive authority.
The Problem of Self-Declared Impact
When organizations declare their own impact, three problems arise.
First, attribution becomes speculative.
Complex social outcomes rarely have single causes. When industry reports claim impact based on activity alone, they overstate causality and understate context.
Second, values are silently imposed.
What counts as “positive impact” is not universal. Employment may be valued differently depending on job quality, cultural alignment, or opportunity cost. Infrastructure may enable growth or exacerbate inequality. When industry defines impact, it defines success through its own lens.
Third, accountability is weakened.
If impact is self-declared, there is no external reference point for challenge or correction. Reporting becomes a closed loop: the actor defines the metric, measures it, and validates its own success.
This is not accountability. It is narrative control.
Why Indigenous Contexts Make the Problem Visible
These issues exist across all social reporting, but they are especially visible—and especially problematic—in Indigenous contexts.
Indigenous communities are not generic stakeholders. They are rights-holders with distinct legal, cultural, and governance authority. Impact, in these contexts, is inseparable from self-determination.
For industry to claim Indigenous impact is, intentionally or not, to claim the right to define what progress, benefit, or harm looks like for Indigenous peoples. That authority does not reside with corporations, investors, or even governments. It resides with the communities themselves.
This is why many Indigenous leaders react skeptically to corporate impact reports, even when the underlying activities are well-intentioned. The discomfort is not with measurement per se. It is with who is doing the defining.
Opportunity and Benefit: A More Honest Frame
If industry cannot credibly report on impact, what can it report on?
The answer is both simpler and more demanding: opportunity and benefit.
Opportunity reporting focuses on what industry makes available:
procurement opportunities offered
employment opportunities created
training, advancement, and ownership pathways
access to capital, assets, or infrastructure
Benefit reporting focuses on what industry contributes or transfers:
dollars paid to businesses or workers
wages, hours, and job tenure
equity participation or revenue sharing
community investments and contributions
These are not semantic substitutions. They are conceptually different claims.
Opportunity and benefit are descriptive, not interpretive.
They describe actions and transfers, not social meaning.
They sit squarely within the organization’s control.
They can be defined, standardized, audited, and compared.
Most importantly, they stop short of claiming impact.
Impact as a Community Determination
Under this framing, impact is not ignored—it is re-situated.
Impact becomes something that communities:
define for themselves
assess against their own priorities
articulate in their own time and language
Industry’s role is not to proclaim impact, but to provide credible, decision-grade evidence about opportunities and benefits that communities can use to make their own determinations.
This distinction restores epistemic humility to reporting. It acknowledges that social change is not linear, not uniform, and not owned by the initiator of activity.
In Indigenous contexts, it also aligns reporting with the principle that communities are not data subjects, but authorities over meaning.
Why the Language Matters
Some may argue that this is merely a terminological debate. It is not.
Language structures systems. What we call something determines:
who is seen as the knower
who is seen as the beneficiary
who has standing to validate claims
Calling activity-based disclosures “impact reporting” subtly centers industry as the arbiter of social outcomes. Reframing them as opportunity and benefit reporting recenters communities as the arbiters of impact.
This shift has practical consequences. It changes how indicators are designed, how assurance is approached, and how power is distributed in reporting relationships.
From Claims to Conditions
A more mature reporting paradigm would draw a clear boundary:
Industry reports on conditions created
Communities determine impact experienced
This does not weaken accountability; it strengthens it. It makes claims more precise and disputes more legible. It creates space for dialogue rather than declaration.
It also prepares the ground for truly credible systems—ones in which standardized, normative disclosures about opportunity and benefit can coexist with community-led interpretations of impact.
A Necessary Reset
The ambition behind impact reporting has always been laudable: to move beyond financial performance and take social consequences seriously. But ambition does not excuse conceptual shortcuts.
If the field is to progress, it must abandon the comforting fiction that impact can be self-reported by those who initiate activity. It must accept that impact is not something industry delivers, but something others experience.
The first step is linguistic honesty.
Industry does not report impact.
It reports what it offers and what it contributes.
Impact belongs to the community.
