The Politics of Arctic Resources

Change and Continuity in the "Old North" of Northern Europe

E. Keskitalo, E. C. H. Keskitalo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138040601
• eBook ISBN: 9781351705332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Real Estate
• Index: Business

The Arctic has often been seen as a natural area, or even a "wilderness", where mainly indigenous and subsistence activities have been prominent. Contrary to this, the present volume highlights the very long historical development of resource use systems in northern Europe, across multiple actors and multiple levels, and including varying population groups.

The book takes a past-present-future perspective that illustrates the paths to institutional emergence, change or persistence over time. It also illustrates how institutions may themselves drive changes, through a focus on resource use cases in northern Europe. This volume demonstrates that understanding "northern" issues is less about understanding sets of geophysical, climatological or environmental conditions than about understanding social and institutional structures. Understanding these trajectories into the future is seen as a key way of understanding what responses to future change may be likely and what the institutions are that will shape, limit or enable our responses to climate change.

This book will be of great use to scholars and graduates in the fields of Arctic and northern-region politics, and to researchers of resource use and climate change with a focus on vulnerability, social vulnerability, adaptation and mitigation.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction. Understanding historical contingencies into the future: cases from northern Europe
• 2 Hot-spots and spaces in-between: development and settlement in the “Old North”
• 3 State and resources in the north: from territorial assertion to the “smorgasbord state”
• 4 The institutionalization of forestry as a primary land use in Sweden
• 5 Constructing northern Fennoscandia as a mining region
• 6 Making “wilderness” in a northern natural resource periphery: on restructuring and the production of a pleasure periphery in northern Sweden
• 7 Ethnic identity and resource rights in Sweden
• 8 Energy regimes in the Fennoscandian north, c. 1900–2015
• 9 Oil and gas extraction in the Barents Sea: a Nordic state-industry governance system goes north
• 10 Troubling the northern seas: the turbulent history of Norwegian and Russian fisheries
• 11 Imageries and historical change in the European Russian Arctic
• 12 Regional futures nested in global structures
• 13 Conclusion. The “Old North” – or quite simply the developed northern Europe
• Index