Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic: Perspectives from the Barents Area

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Chapter 5 · Future narratives

Narratives often play “ a rhetorical role in producing futures ” (Avango et al., 2013) and this rhetorical role warrants some reflection on what we do when using and producing scenario narratives. For example,we need to pay attention to the fact that scenarios are reflections of contemporary knowledge,discourses, ambitions, and power relations.This raises questions about who has power to partake inproducing scenarios.It also highlights the need for researchers and practitioners to reflect on how language, social roles and relationships influence the communicative situations within which scenarios are constructed, and how the situations ultimately enable or inhibit agency. The constructednature of narrativesmeans that different plotlines can be drawn from the same facts and that they often include underlying assumptions that are not always transparent.Examples include Arctic narratives about how rapid climate change is associated with multiple risks and opportunities, which in turn create a need for adaptation. Such claims provide information/ knowledge about a particular situation and at the same time frame the problemand solution in a certainway.Another narrative based on the same facts might frame the solution not in terms of trying to adapt within the current system logic but in terms of a need for a radical transformation of the system itself. Narratives come into existence through social networks across different institutional, cultural, and geographical scales. The specific perceptions of problems and solutions provided in a narrative are the result of societal processes where some worldviews (values and perceptions) appear as more legitimate than others. One can think of these processes as random without a specific goal or ambition, but in practice they may be facilitated by particular interest groups or power networks and emerge as a ‘group story’ that gains hegemony over narratives told by less dominant actors (Paschen and Ison, 2014). Scholars warn against crisis narratives as dominant climate-change narratives about the Arctic, constituted by researchers or experts that emphasize the power of global climate systems to threaten northern communities by situating them as being intrinsically at risk.This can drown out alternative narratives of civic participation, including northern communities as actors in decision-making (Bravo, 2009). This is why a deliberative approach is vital in the process of framing and narrating futures. The way that time is constructed in climate-change narratives may affect imaginations of the future (Brace and Geoghegan, 2011). Climate-change scenarios tend to focus on specific end points, for example 2050 or 2100. This organizes data in ways that are ‘inconceivably distant’ for most people, not least when there is a need to make decisions now (Hulme, 2009; Brace and Geoghegan, 2011). In climate-change adaptation narratives, it is therefore important to be cognizant of the relations between global, sometimes long-term, narratives of climate andmore local, sometimes episodic and anecdotal narratives of weather (Daniels and Endfield, 2009). Situating climate change in timescales that are useful for decision-making can serve as a way to challenge the determinism that often appears in discussions of climate change, and thus highlight the role of agency and choice. While attention to chance, openness and unpredictability might cultivate apathy and indecision (Brace and Geoghegan, 2011), the use of participative future scenarios, grounded locally, offers a way to create openness to the fact that the decision we make now will also affect the future.

Participatory scenario exercises can be described as a way of creating boundary spaces between science and practice that hopefully play a similar role to boundary organizations, which have been effective nodes for communication between different expert communities (Guston, 2001). Participatory methodologies often focus more on qualitative than quantitative information. Narratives play a particularly important role, and this section provides background on the use of narratives for exploring potential futures. In the process of learning,communicating andmaking decisions, people do not add new information at random to a loose conglomerationof earlierknowledge,instead theyconstructmental models that help make sense of observations (Kempton et al., 1996).These mental models are simplified representations of the world and exhibit story-like properties (Bruner, 1991). Stories and story-telling can therefore help translate complex scientific data into a more comprehensible format by presenting them in a way that relates more to everyday life (Paschen and Ison, 2014). The use of narratives can therefore serve as a communication device.Moreover,it can help bring information to the table that is initially not framed in scientific language, including the expertise and experience of local and regional actors, and can facilitate the translation of local knowledge into policy-relevant data. As discussed in Chapter 3, the creation of dynamic social arenas where researchers participate alongside other actors, places focus on dialogue and a mutual construction of meaning (Ison and Russell, 2007). Such dialogue and knowing-in-action (Ison et al., 2011), where reframing of challenges is facilitated, contributes to integrating knowledge-making with decision- making on the ground (Leach et al., 2010). In the context of scenarios, narratives, or storylines, are internally consistent qualitative descriptions of howthe futuremight develop. Narrations of futurephysical andhumangeographies thus describe possible scenarios of change.Narratives canbe articulated inmany ways, both by experts, plotting a narrative onto communities, or by communities, constructing a narrative to inform perceptions of past and future possibilities (Daniels and Endfield, 2009; McIntosh et al.,2000).Narratives aboutArctic futures have a long history that has often been linked to political ambitions for the region. They have often followed plotlines of either opportunity or decline.With climate change, there has been a recent surge in the production of Arctic futures (Arbo et al., 2013). Paschen and Ison (2014) identified two dimensions of narratives that are particularly relevant for discussing adaptation. First, they point to how we ‘story’ the environment, and how our stories determine our understanding and adaptation in practice; how risks are defined, who is authorized as actors in the change debate, and the range of policy options considered. Second, they claim that, beyond producing data on local knowledge and on the socio-cultural and affective-emotive factors influencing adaptive capacity, narrative research can significantly inform public engagement, deliberation and learning strategies. 5.3.1 Narratives as communication: social learning and knowing in action 5.3.2 What are narratives and how do they evolve?