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

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

several of the narratives from the workshop highlight how affinity to the local context would favor decisions to protect the local environment in contrast to decisions taken elsewhere leading to more pollution. Sense of place is sometimes used as a way to capture the complex processes that make people identify their relation to a particular locality.While sense of place in the Arctic has historically been linked to local contexts, culture and knowledge, this was not necessarily the case in the narratives about possible futures. Several feature an influx of people from elsewhere, as either a workforce or as refugees. Sense of place then becomes part of incorporating this new diversity in a way that ensures that newcomers start to care for the local context,environmentally and socially.In the circumpolar North,international cooperation has extended the sense of place,as was evident in shared experiences among reindeer herding youth fromacross the EurasianArctic at the Gávnnadeapmi workshop. In the future,‘sense of place’may thus not only relate to the local context but also to how global development influences international security, global markets, and knowledge in its broadest sense. 5.4.3 Reflections on workshop outcomes The workshop participants clearly saw their local context as part of a global world and that their future will be affected by global development, not only regarding climatic and other environmental changes but also related to energy and resource markets and international security developments that lead to migration. The local and regional impacts identified in the workshops were seen to depend on a combination of the extent to which local actors have decisionmaking power and‘soft’features such as world views,values,sense of place,and entrepreneurship. Many of the global trends are likely to affect whether people stay or leave the places that are now populated. Population trends can thus be seen as a key outcome of global drivers of change.However, regional population trends are also drivers of change. Together with know-how, entrepreneurship, and values, demography shapes the capacity of societies to meet challenges ahead, regardless of what the global future may look like. The futures that people envision are very context- and time dependent, where current local concerns have impacts on what issues workshop participants deem important or uncertain. Similarly, the envisioned future developments were affected to a large degree by how participants saw the role of local actors in relation to the global drivers, as active or passive in shaping the local future.Because of this context dependency,narratives will be different each time a workshop is convened.The advantage is that narratives generated fromworkshopdiscussions add to the rangeof potential futures in discussions about adaptation actions and give an indication of the uncertainty space that society has to navigate. Challenges with the participatory methodology are associated with finding local and regional actors that are willing to spend one or two days in the workshop.Moreover,most stakeholders participating (with very few exemptions) were engaged only during the workshop event itself, despite interaction being sought both in advance (preparations) and after the meeting (quality check of constructed narratives).

The themes of technology and know-how are also closely related to larger issues of how the cultural environment develops.At the Gávnnadeapmi workshop,traditional knowledgewas highlighted as one of the key issues for understanding the future,withmajor differences on how it would be valued in the different global futures. For example, the Fossil-fueled Development pathway with its emphasis on rapid technological development included possibilities of a high-tech intensive reindeer industry based on genetically engineered animals. This was accompanied by a loss in indigenous languages but also by an increasing number of highly educated reindeer herders. By contrast, the Green Road pathway implied integration of traditional knowledge to decision-making at all levels,newunique education systems,and nomadic livelihoods being highly esteemed. 5.4.2.6 International security and cooperation A theme that appeared in some form in all workshops was international security and cooperation. Military activities were generally seen as less likely to have local impacts, despite the strong military presence in the region and historic experiences of direct impacts of war. However, a development towards international insecurity and conflicts was identified as a key issue with other potential impacts.Arctic locations remote from conflict areas have already seen an increasing number of refugees, which is a development that some scenarionarratives highlighted. Moreover, impacts of increasing international tensions and conflicts may be felt via market forces. For example, increasing pressure on resources that are available in the region or changes in foodmarketsmay affect demand for reindeermeat.Some specific issues that were raised byworkshopparticipants point to potential for both increasing and decreasing tensions at the regional level. In Bodø, discussions included how increasing tensions could come from increasing international fisheries leading to pressures on the current legal framework for ocean governance, while declining sea ice could lead to decreased potential for conflict betweenNorway and Russia because Russia would have its own open water harbors in the Arctic. The narratives from the Murmansk region and from the Gávnnadeapmi workshop highlight the role of regional cooperation, such as the Barents regional cooperation and cross-border indigenous cooperation. In one of the Nordland narratives,regional cooperation becomes more focused on joint economic interests as a result of increasing international insecurity. Power to make decisions about local development was an important theme (see also Section 5.4.2.3). At the Pajala workshop, power relations between the local and national level featured very high on the list of critical drivers of change, while the issue of fate control was more interconnected with other issues at the workshop in Bodø. A major issue here was power relationships between global companies and local municipalities. At the Gávnnadeapmi workshop, power issues became explicit in relation to a very strong focus on the role of indigenous rights as well as highlighting how dependent future development is on national policies. In the Murmansk narratives, power relations were not discussed explicitly but 5.4.2.7 Fate control, sense of place and cultural diversity