Companies don’t want to navigate a complicated permitting process and spend years working with a tribe only for another business to swoop in and win rights to the project at the last minute, Woolf said.

One company quickly caught up in the new policy is Pumped Hydro Storage, which wants a preliminary permit for a project near the Little Colorado River on Navajo Nation land in Arizona. In light of its new policy, the commission asked for more input from those it potentially impacts before they decide what to do.

The company’s manager, Steve Irwin, said pumped storage is important but hard to build on the Navajo Nation’s land.

“There’s no clear pathway to doing business on the reservation,” Irwin said. “It’s almost like you have to have 100% unanimous consensus. It’s not majority, it’s got to be 100%, and it’s like, you are never going to get 100%.”