JUSTNORTH

Resetting Processes for Economic Development in the Arctic

Sulitjelma Copper Mine, Credit: Gustav Sigeman.

JUSTNORTH is an EU-funded Climate Action Project creating processes for ethical decision-making for Arctic resources. Dr Corine Wood-Donnelly explains the project’s broad stakeholder engagement to resolve critical issues in developing Arctic economies.

Within an Arctic region including Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Greenland, Iceland, Canada and the United States, the JUSTNORTH research spans an enormous, diverse geography. The project is specifically a response to the EU’s requirement to evaluate the viability of sustainable economic development in the Arctic. The EU has a vested interest in the resources of the Arctic, to meet raw materials and sustainability goals, so defining the most appropriate and sustainable approach has become critical for planning ahead.

The area north of the Arctic Circle is an important part of the world. It’s a barometer of climate change and it is changing at pace. It remains rich in natural resources

and consequently is of great interest to a wide variety of organisations. The Arctic has tremendous appeal as one of the great resource basins of the world to industrial developers, investors, and governments but also existing communities living in the Arctic.

Critical raw materials and energy resources continue to attract attention toward Arctic development. While holding a long-time attraction to adventurers, the Arctic is becoming one of the most attractive new adventure destinations for cruises. There is potential for harvesting biotic resources - timber and marine life and whilst prospecting organisations see all this abundant development potential, the impacts on ecosystems, local communities

and competing Arctic stakeholders can be left out of decision-making that impacts their daily lives.

Within these countries inside the Arctic Circle, the communities that live in them and investors from outside the region, all compete for land use to exploit or manage its valuable commodities and landscapes. There needs to be more consideration of sustainable development and respect for the sensitivities and needs of those living in the region.

Often decision-making about development in this region of the world revolves around technical feasibility and profitability alone, leaving the ethics of how that development affects local communities residing in the Arctic, firmly in the shadows.

Whilst there is an increase in protests about development in the Arctic by indigenous people and also political and scientific groups, there is also much disquiet and irritation about local impacts, a silent resentment toward injustices and the way decisions about land use, laws and developments are made in the first place. There are many pressing issues, such as how ecosystems are impacted by overfishing and mining without proper governance, how pollution comes with industrial processes, how shipping increases with tourism, how to maintain biodiversity under threat, managing land and protecting vulnerable local communities and how some developments compromise values and cultural identity.

The conflicts, injustices and disagreements that occur require more robust methodologies and new frameworks, including procedural and legal ones, to support fairer, balanced involvement of all those relevant to the debate, so all the voices have an opportunity to be heard.

“We need to have justice as the foundation for the decision-making about the development of economic activities in the Arctic for the future,” explained WoodDonnelly. “We would bring different aspects of distributional justice, recognitional justice, procedural justice and also hopefully a cosmopolitan overview of justice, which brings the global top-down perspective for justice because we’re all stakeholders to the Arctic.”

A history of development From the trade in whale oil from the 1830s to the modern-day extraction of hydrocarbons, the Arctic has long been perceived and exploited as an environment ripe with economic opportunities.

Wood-Donnelly explained: “There has been a long history of development in

Photograph by Corine Wood-Donnelly.

the Arctic. Take, for example, the Hudson Bay Company in Canada with fur trading, and the LKAB iron ore mining company in Sweden, which is over a hundred years old.

You see the way the infrastructure has been brought into the landscape, often without consultation or permission from the people who live there. There are conflicts between communities because you have competing land use issues, and you have different types of economies trying to operate in the same space using different resources within that space. In one place you could have forestry, tourism, reindeer-herding and that same space is used in these different ways by different groups.”

Research on the ground The JUSTNORTH researchers sought to work hand-in-glove with a wide range of stakeholders to understand the challenges, value systems and injustices in decisionmaking in the Arctic region. Seventeen case studies were created to evaluate various economic activities.

“For each case study, each researcher was expected to conduct at least twenty interviews with stakeholders, yet some did fifty or more and all-in-all we worked with more than four hundred stakeholders and rightholders.

“Our research methodology was co-production for engagement with communities, so this was not just desk-based research. We needed to speak and work directly with local communities. We worked together with stakeholders to inform and achieve the results of the project. With many injustices that we found, we had no previous indication that these existed, and it inspired tweaks for barriers to be removed.”

For the purposes of organisation, stakeholders were inserted into categories depending on whether they were community, industry actors, government actors or voluntary sector. Within each of the categories were a vast range of subgroups, for example, government would include everything from a Mayor’s Office to an EU Member state representative, businesses could be local small businesses to major corporations and volunteers could mean local charities to global charities.

Community included both stakeholders and rightsholders of people living in the Arctic. From the findings of these engagements, recommendations were made for policies and practices aimed to create more inclusive, balanced decisionmaking processes in the Arctic’s sustainable economic development.

New structures for just decision-making After the lengthy research process, a series of recommendations were created. The recommendations revealed many concerns that may have been overlooked. For example, rural communities wanted more investment in transport links, which were unevenly distributed and centred in urban areas.

There was ‘ire’ towards some renewable energy projects, where consultation and Photograph by Corine Wood-Donnelly.

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www.euresearcher.com

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JUSTNORTH Towards a Just, Ethical, and Sustainable Arctic

Project Objectives

JUSTNORTH explores the diverse perspectives and values that stakeholders can bring to decision-making in the Arctic economies.

The overall aim is to support ethical and just decisions in terms of development, fairness and justice for the many different Arctic stakeholders. Based on a series of in-depth case studies and research the EU-funded project provides recommendations for municipalities, regional and national governments, and the EU.

Project Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union`s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under agreement No 869327.

Project Partners

https://justnorth.eu/about-partners/

Contact Details

Project Coordinator, Corine Wood-Donnelly Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Faculty Uppsala University T: +46 (0) 18 471 00 00 E: c.wood-donnelly@nord.no W: https://justnorth.eu

Corine Wood-Donnelly

Corine Wood-Donnelly is Associate Professor of Social Sciences with expertise in International Relations & the High North at Nord University.

She is also a researcher at Uppsala University where she is the Scientific Coordinator for the EU-funded project JUSTNORTH (GA 869327).

Wood-Donnelly is an interdisciplinary scholar and specialises in governance and policy of the Arctic region. She has published on iceberg sovereignty, justice in Arctic Governance Structures as well as Science Diplomacy and the role of the environment in normative rulemaking for the Arctic.

involvement, and also permissions would have been valuable prior to development.

“Some recommendations will be targeted towards municipalities, giving them the opportunity to say ‘no’ to development proposals or ask for preferable conditions to be in place before proceeding. Recommendations will also be for national-level legislation, including things we initially didn’t expect to find that could be embedded in labour law, tax law and import and export law. These are often little tweaks that change things.”

The project recognised a need for more transparency and openness, less compartmentalisation in institutions and more communication, for instance via roundtable meetings. Many issues have

and value systems, providing a method to determine the viability of economic activities in the Arctic and to create pathways for clear ethic-based decision-making, for sustainable and just development.

To communicate the project’s aims and impacts accessibly to a wide audience, a documentary film was created, which can be shared with conferences, forums and theatres across Europe.

“I like the idea of doing something a bit different to reach an audience. There are a number of messages that we’re trying to highlight in the documentary. One is the fact that the Arctic is a region that’s impacted by climate change and development must be understood in the context of climate change.

We would bring different aspects of distributional justice, recognitional justice, procedural justice and also hopefully a cosmopolitan overview of justice, which brings the global top-down perspective for justice because we’re all stakeholders to the Arctic. become amplified with a lack of interaction, communication and understanding between all the relevant stakeholders and so addressing this will be advantageous.

A benefit of the project is comparing ideas from different countries to share and duplicate the ones that work well. For example, one recommendation for bolstering energy security is the promotion of community-based ownership structures for local energy, where energy is owned by a small community, which can feed into the energy security of Europe.

With this concept, the impact would be farreaching, adding benefits for a local community whilst driving wider sustainability aims.

In addition, the JUSTscore negotiation tool was created by the project. This is designed to reconcile multiple intersecting ethics

We’re trying to bring out recognition of the legacies of colonialism, and the impact that this has on people’s ability to trust decision-making processes, together with the lack of trust that exists for procedural justice. We’re trying to highlight issues of competing land use and distributional justice; we are trying to identify the harms and the benefits of economic development. We’re asking how does the Arctic fit into the context of globalised processes?”

As climate change affects the Arctic Circle, the Arctic could also hold some of the answers to climate mitigating actions and whilst economic development is inevitable in the region, the specifics of how it is done, who benefits, and the wider impacts of these actions can now be worked out via just and ethical processes.

Photograph by Corine Wood-Donnelly.

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