Seminar reflections – Governance of the Arctic 30/3

Reflection Current Debates, 30/3
Camilla Winqvist

Since I went to the seminar at KTH, I decided to write my reflection assignment on that instead of our seminar so that you can all take part of the things that were said.

First of all, it was not a lecture as said on our schedule for the course. It was a higher seminar, meaning that all of the people in the room (except for me) had PhDs. I felt a bit out of place because of this, but I took notes as best as I could and tried to look like I belonged. I did not.
The discussion at the seminar was not really about the Arctic, but more about Nilsson’s and Christensen’s new project which they presented at the seminar. The others in the room were critiquing their theories, methods and concepts so the discussion was purely theoretical and methodological. Needless to say, the discussion was not on a Masters’ level.

Firstly, Nilsson and Christensen spoke about their project called “Arctic governance and the questions of ‘fit’ in an era of globally transformative change”. Nilsson spoke about the term “governance” and why it was a loaded term. She argued that governance can be done by more than just formal governments, for example networks of non-state actors. There are also different kinds of governance in the Arctic, she spoke about hard law vs soft law. Hard law is binding agreements with possible sanctions if you break them, while soft law is for example cooperation between different stakeholders that is not binding and less formal. She also spoke some about the fact that the stakeholders not necessarily are the ones with arctic borders, other countries (and corporations) have interests there which makes governance hard for purely diplomatic reasons.

Christensen then spoke about geopolitics as it plays out, and that it is the object of study for them, and the different forms of geopolitics (structural, practical, formal and popular). The classical geopolitical view of space is “space as given”, while critical geopolitics views space as “space as constructed”.
Their study will focus on discourse and content between the different stakeholders that govern the Arctic, and they will analyse the discourse as an iterative interplay.

They got some feedback from the other researchers in the room, amongst them Sverker Sörlin and Gunnel Cederlöf.
Quite a few felt that the term “fit” was not explained properly, and that they could not really understand it. I cannot for the life of me even try to retell the discussion about “fit”, and I cannot even tell you what “fit is. Although, I will not feel that bad about it since not even Sverker Sörlin understood the concept.

I know that you wanted me to ask about the future of the Arctic and what needs to be done to improve the conditions, but I could not bear to ask when all of the others only asked about semantics, theory and methods. I will point out, again, that this was NOT a lecture and the seminar was purely about the theoretical and methodological outline of their new project.

Ps, Sorry about the late upload!

My (late) reflection: “Critical notes about resilience”.

As I talked in our meeting I am interested in the origins and in the political effects around the resilience concept. The first time as I heard about this concept was as a psycological ability which all the persons have in order to restore themselves after living traumatic experiences. Such as an example, the people who have lived in places where war has happened, can found new ways to survive after the warfare risks have passed.

In the interim report from 2012 about resilience in the arctic, is informed and defined the resilience from ecosystems as those capacities of the biological or environment systems that can restore old lost states of environmental functions. But, how the ecosystems can restore themselves without disappearing the risks which exists over their natural functions? This question guides the next reflection.

As we discussed, also in our meeting, the biggest country on the world, China, is claiming the arctic for its managing, exploitation and free use. This claiming could be assessed from a global perspective, in the sense that China with their more than one billion of inhabitants,need for their future generations arctic natural resources. If we think globally around the idea that the arctic is a human patrimony, one of the natural consequences is that Chinese peoples, being part of humankind, have rights over managing the Arctic. In what way and based on what circumstances China could be manage the Arctic is a big question, if we take in account the big capacity from chinese peoples to put limits on their behavoirs. The restrictions over their biological functions as their reproductive capacity, and the consequent outcome in the chinese families from today, is a clear example about the efectivenees of the chinese peoples. What other big people has could put limits to their reproductive expansion through politic decisions? No one as the chinese appear today as the more awarness about the impact over the environment that have the human production and consumption, and it´s the reason for the economic punishment to those families which have more than one child.

The resilience concept fixes only in those societies which have strong institutions, big trust in their policy-makers and efective legal systems, as we can see with the chinese societies. But, what about the nations which claiming posession over the Arctic? Are their institutions strong? Respect their peoples to their governant classes? Social control over their peoples are efective? So far away from that, many of the imperial nations which want dominate the arctic are characterized by their economic oligopolies which benefit free enterprise more than sustainable development.

The conflict between economic principles and ecological principles is clear today, indeed in the managing over the Arctic. I think that it´s the point that we can assessed deeply.

I will dive into a few topics covered by the ”Arctic Resilience Interim Report 2013” and ”The Arctic Environment – From Low To High Politics” and will elaborate on some questions concerning these.

From ”Arctic Environment – From Low to High Politics”:
In 2007 the sea-ice reach a minimum like never before. This called for great attention from observers. The reason is combined climate change and globalization, which has lead to a call for a stronger Arctic political regime. I would like to stop at that information. Surely, this can not be the first time that a minimum of the sea-ice, alarming in relation to earlier observations, have been observed. The text explains that one prominent reason is economic development, which relates to exploitation of natural resources, transport and tourism. The question becomes, why is it that economy seems to drive people to use nature as one pleases? To me this seems to be the case. In my opinion, economy should instead be subordinated nature, for our very lives depend upon nature. If this could sink in among economy regimes, I believe we could make progress and hopefully reverse the climate change we see escalating.

From the ”Arctic Resilience Interim Report 2013”:
Indigenous people have a capacity to view the environment different from traditional Western science. I understand it as if they see nature almost as an integrated part of us, as a whole, and not in isolation as do Western science. They also tend to have a spiritual understanding of nature. Indigenous people, although very different from Western scientists, have valuable information passed on from generations orally on how to take care of nature. This information is important in building resilient cities and is included in the Arctic Council assessment processes. I belive this is a good thing to do. From what I understand this has only been included in recent years. Whatever the time when it was included, I see this as very important since I can imagine that the Western science do not have all the answers when it comes to this topic of resilience.

The author goes into various pilot case studies. I will look at two of these. Firstly, they discuss strategies to enhance the resilience of Sámi reindeer husbandry to rapid changes in the Arctic. The study is on the Sámi reindeer herding community in Finnmark, Norway. Since the 1600s many governmental changes have occured where for example migration routes. Some of these changes has led to a decreasing usage of traditional knowledge of Sámi herding, leading to a more instable resilience. Climate change has also caused a blockage of migration where the snow is either too much or there is ice underneath the snow. This can lead to starvation. The conditions are serious and the solution for a better resilience is to integrate traditional knowledge into formal governance systems and teach and involve the younger generation in traditional knowledge, according to the authors.
What caught my attention concerning this issue is that the changes from the 1600s have affected the herding community on so many levels. What one can learn from this is to respect the natural borders, migration routes etcetra which have been shaped for ages, from generation to generation. Perhaps there are few of these left in the world, this would be interesting to know. However, the modern world has in the cases of the Sámi reindeer husbandry realized they have to rethink and make a differences as to include more traditional knowledge in the husbandry. This is a good thing, yet I wonder how come this has not occured earlier? Maybe the negative consequences have not been large enough. I believe though, that these changes can be positive for other communities as well to adopt.

A second pilot study includes food security in the Arctic.
”Food security exist ’when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’.”
Food and water security is of concern when things like water- and food borne diseases, high cost for a ”healthy food basket” and other factors affect the security. Another is climate change, which can make it difficult to hunt marine mammals due to thinning of ice sea (difficult access to hunting grounds). There are also contaminants in the Arctic biota which bioaccummulate in food. The issues are many.
What societies do in a resilience framework is that they can for example share available food and also that they know alternative ways of getting the food and water that they need. To build in resilience in political decisions concerning food security is one of the authors´ suggestion. I truly think that resilience in this context is of high importance. I find it hard in what other way the Arctic can reach food security effectively. But it all requires that the facts of resilience concerning food- and water security become a reality. I believe the difficult part will be to actually implement the knowledge of resilience fully, since it needs to influence politics to a high degree and perhaps not all in power will agree on the solutions and thereby not all of the changes will come to pass. However to contiually strive thereafter is of course what is needed in order to see a further implementation of the resilience.