The Politics of Sustainability in the Arctic

Reconfiguring Identity, Space, and Time

Ulrik Pram Gad, Jeppe Strandsbjerg, Ulrik Pram Gad, Jeppe Strandsbjerg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351031967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ökologie

The Politics of Sustainability in the Arctic argues that sustainability is a political concept because it defines and shapes competing visions of the future. In current Arctic affairs, prominent stakeholders agree that development needs to be sustainable, but there is no agreement over what it is that needs to be sustained. In original conservationist discourse, the environment was the sole referent object of sustainability; however, as sustainability discourses have expanded, the concepthas beenlinked to an increasing number of referent objects, such as society, economy, culture, and identity.

This book sets out a theoretical framework for understanding and analysing sustainability as a political concept, and provides a comprehensive empirical investigation of Arctic sustainability discourses. Presenting a range of case studies from Greenland, Norway, Canada, Russia, Iceland, and Alaska, thechapters in this volume analyse the concept of sustainability and how actors are employing and contesting this concept in specific regions within the Arctic. In doing so, the book demonstrates how sustainability is being given new meanings in the postcolonial Arctic and what the political implications are for postcoloniality, nature, and development more broadly.

Beyond those interested in the Arctic, this book will also be of great value to students and scholars of sustainability, sustainable development, and identity and environmental politics.

1 Introduction

Sustainability as a political concept in the Arctic

Ulrik Pram Gad, Marc Jacobsen, and Jeppe Strandsbjerg

In 2013, Greenland’s legislature (Inatsisartut) overturned a 1988 ban on the mining of radioactive materials. While the critics of this controversial decision highlighted the environmental hazards involved in the mining process, as well as ethical problems, the proponents argued that lifting the ban would contribute to the sustainable development of Greenland. Sustainable in this context means that the Greenlandic society would be able to sustain itself economically. The logic of this argument flies in the face of one of the most common assumptions about sustainability: that it is about protecting nature from adverse effects from human activity. Moreover, the argument sits uneasily with another understanding prevalent in the Arctic, namely that Indigenous ways of living are also worth sustaining. However, it makes sense within a national logic according to which it is neither nature nor culture but a particular community – in this case the modern, postcolonial Greenlandic one – that needs to be sustained. But unsustainable global levels of CO₂ emission destroy the natural habitat of the polar bear and make seal hunting difficult. So producing energy from uranium rather than oil may also contribute to sustaining certain Arctic ecosystems and cultural practices. The decision to lift the ban clearly exhibits the political character of the concept of sustainability.

The Greenlandic controversy is just one example of how debates over sustainability in the Arctic often come across as conflicting questions of life and death answered in slow motion. Listening to people talking and reading what academics write, sustainability appears to be at the centre of politics. For the presence in the Arctic of any activity or body – individual or collective – to be legitimate, it must present itself as sustainable or at least on track to becoming so. It was not always so. In that sense, sustainability has become a precondition for life in the Arctic. At the same time, it seems that ‘sustainability’ is able to serve any purpose. Sustainability as a concept entails radically different futures depending on what it is that should be sustained. The difficulties involved in prioritizing or combining the sustainability of a community, of Indigenous ways of life, of the global climate, and of a prospective nation state highlights the political character of the concept of sustainability and also why it is worth analysing.

The purpose of this book, then, is to investigate what it means to think of sustainability as a political concept. The way we do that is by answering the overall research question: How are struggles over rights and resources in the Arctic reconfigured by the concept of sustainability? To answer this question, it is necessary to engage the question of what sustainability does. What are the consequences of sustainability becoming an ‘obligatory concept’? And when we talk about consequences, we are not thinking about what sustainability does to the environment or to development, but rather what it does to political discourse. In response, this volume aims to posit sustainability as a political concept, suggest a framework for studying sustainability as a political concept, and set out a trajectory indicating the political and analytical purchase of such an approach. We want to be able to analyse and understand how, when the concept of sustainability is introduced, struggles over rights and resources are reconfigured: e.g. what difference it makes that Greenlanders and Nunavummiut – along with foreign investors and Danish and Canadian authorities – debate mining in terms of sustainability. How does ‘sustainability’ facilitate some and impede the promotion of other identities, projects, and scales?

Despite the fairly obvious political content of the concept, Krueger and Gibbs’ decade-old observation that ‘[e]ngaging the politics of sustainability represents a gap in the current sustainability literature’ (2007:2) still holds. Sustainability is a political concept because it defines and shapes different discourses about future developments; that is, competing visions of the future. Across the Arctic, sustainability plays a central role in almost every development programme. Aspirations of economic exploitation, business strategies, and social planning are defined in terms of sustainability. But so are local and Indigenous efforts to maintain a community or a particular way of life. Sometimes sustainability appears in conceptual majestic solitude in which case it signifies the urge, desire, or need to simply maintain something – or find a way to make everything form a synthesis.

The basic idea of sustainability has long historical roots. However, the articulation in the work of the Brundtland Commission (WCED 1987) became a defining moment: it combined caring for the natural environment with ‘economic development’. When ‘development’ is added to the concept, ‘sustainability’ emerges as a more obviously political concept. The combination of a desire to change while keeping something stable fuels the political character of the concept. It raises the questions of what it is that should be preserved in the future while we at the same time undergo change? When? How? And who should be responsible? After the wedding of ‘sustainability’ and ‘development’, it was clear from the wider discourses involved that it was societies that should develop – both to become more equitable but also to allow the natural environment to be preserved (Redclift 1987). Soon, however, human collectives were featured at the ‘stable’ side of the equation: under the banner of ‘sustainable development’, advocates and analysts promoted communities, cultures, groups, livelihoods, and cultural diversity as worthy of being sustained (Jacobs 1999:37; Kates et al. 2005:11). Our contention is that this tendency has continued: a wider and wider array of entities and phenomena appears as objects of sustainability.

It makes little sense to study sustainability in a vacuum. Concepts always carry with them a baggage of meaning conveyed by other concepts accompanying them – and when sustainability is introduced in a new context, it inevitably articulates pre-existing meaning structures. This will be obvious to anyone studying sustainability in the Arctic: here, changes to the climate, global power balances, demands for natural resources, and aspirations for self-determination set the stage for new political struggles. Central to the struggles is the notion of the Arctic as a special place characterized by a nature at once hostile and fragile. Moreover, sustainability has entered an Arctic political reality, which may be characterized as postcolonial: Indigenous peoples hold a prominent place and have comparatively strong organizations in the Arctic (Jacobsen 2015; Strandsbjerg 2014). Their relations to the respective states involve a variety of autonomy arrangements designed to distance the present from histories of colonialism, paternalism, and exploitation. Legitimizing Indigenous people’s claim to a stake in Arctic governance is not just the fact that they were there first, but also that they managed to sustain themselves on Arctic resources. Hence, ‘sustainability’ has become a pivotal concept in struggles over rights and resources in the Arctic: it increasingly organizes the way Arctic nature and Indigenous identities are presented; it shapes what strategies for the future organization of postcoloniality and that future extractive projects are deemed viable and legitimate.

In order to analyse sustainability as a political concept, we commence by a historical and conceptual positioning of sustainability. In the following, we proceed by outlining a brief history of sustainability as a concept: we identify the marriage between sustainability and development as crucial for the way it plays out as a political concept; we characterize how prevailing images of the Arctic articulate sustainability; and we introduce the postcolonial and Indigenous question as an important vector in the politics of sustainability in this region. We then proceed with a theoretical suggestion on how to approach sustainability as a political concept. By dissecting ‘sustainability’ from ‘development’, we explain how our approach is discursive, but with special emphasis on the role of concepts in structuring discourse: We want to investigate the alterations in meaning structures and struggles for possible futures when ‘sustainability’ is introduced into the grammar of development. In other words, we want to know how identity, space, and time in the Arctic are reconfigured by sustainability.

Problems of sustainability

Concerns with human dependency on limited resources and particular ecosystems can be found throughout history.¹ Central, however, for the present debate on sustainability is the intellectual trajectory that can be traced back to eighteenth-century forest management and political economy (Warde 2011:153). Within this literature, a genre developed advising the head of the household (the Hausvaterliteratur) to cut wood in a durable (nachhaltende) way (Du Pisani 2006:85; Petrov et al. 2017:3; Warde 2011).

From household to globe

Writing before fossil fuel could be utilized, a shortage of timber was predicted (Grober 2007:7), threatening the existence of both states (in need of timber for ships) and households (in need of wood for fire) (Warde 2011:159). Sustainability would be achieved by ensuring that the harvest of timber was made to balance the growth of new forest (Brander 2007:8). Connecting the local harvest with the interest of state, and planning longer than the normal year-to-year horizon, were the first steps towards establishing the resource management literature (Warde 2011). At the same time, this literature wrote the state in as a central institution/actor for nature preservation. The ideas of managing limited resources and connecting the future of the state with resource use remain core elements of the concept of sustainability today (Brander 2007; Lumley and Armstrong 2004; Warde 2011).

However, the defining moment for sustainability as a political concept was the work of the Brundtland Commission (Kirkby et al. 1996:1). With the work of the Brundtland Commission, the concept of sustainability emerged as a global concern in a way that was politically programmatic before it was academic, and the most cited publications remain commissioned reports. Brundtland’s definition of ‘sustainable development’ as ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED 1987), has framed both environmentalism and developmental interests ever since (Quental et al. 2011:20). The 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development reformulated the task ahead by identifying three ‘interdependent and mutually reinforcing pillars’ or dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social, and environmental (Kates et al. 2005:12). Within this framework, sustainability generally relates humanity to the global ecosystem in a way that prescribes socioeconomic development to be shaped in particular ways, rather than delimited (but see Kristoffersen and Langhelle 2017:28).

When social sciences have engaged sustainability debates, what have been called mainstream voices (Krueger and Gibbs 2007:2) has joined the normative commitment to perfecting the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development (e.g. Sen 2009), identifying problems in terms of lack of sustainability (e.g. Parker 2014), and developing and implementing solutions in the form of sustainability (e.g. Edwards 2005). Partly in response to this, a critical tradition including postcolonial, Marxist and political ecology voices have insisted on the political effects of sustainable development (Bryant 1991); some have, for example, found sustainability to be yet another neo-colonial way for the West to dominate the rest by imposing standards limiting prospects for development (e.g. Banerjee 2003; Sachs 1990). While there is intellectual merit and political purchase to both constructive and critical perspectives, the binary choice appears premature: neither loyal implementation nor wholesale rejection of the sustainability agenda help our understanding of the diverse political effects of the concept. Hence, we take our cue from a distinct strand of scholarship pointing to how the concept’s contingent meanings may vary depending on inclusion and exclusion of actors, and the use of different indicators and time scales (Beckerman 1994:239; Lélé 1991:179). In this context, the contribution of this volume is to investigate systematically – within a particular region – exactly to what political uses the concept of sustainability is put and what practices it facilitates. It is to this end we theorize sustainability as a political concept and operationalize our theory as a tool for empirical analysis. For our immediate purpose – to investigate the Arctic – but also with the wider aim of contributing to a generally reproducible analytical strategy applicable to parallel projects in other regions across the globe or to studies focusing on, e.g. a particular socioeconomic sector.

The problems of Arctic sustainability

Sustainability takes on new characteristics when moving from global to regional scales. Prevailing images of both the Arctic population and the Arctic geography set them apart from the logic of global sustainability. Both scholarship and public imagination has long agreed that the Arctic is a special place; even if a variety of imaginaries differ over what makes the region special (Steinberg et al. 2015). Global sustainability discourse lists the Arctic among a few iconic biotopes – along with, among others, the rainforest and coral reefs (Gillespie 2009) – but the particularity of the Arctic goes beyond ecology. First and foremost, the Arctic has been defined as a forbidding space facilitating only fragile ecosystems and, consequently, home only to fragile human communities (Lorentzen et al. 1999:5) that were only relatively recently brought the joys and perils of modernity and substantial statehood. However, as time allowed white people to develop technologies to navigate this forbidding space, the Arctic is increasingly presented as a new resource frontier waiting to be exploited (Howard 2009) and, related, as a matter of global (military) security concern (Kraska 2011). Scholarly writing on sustainability in the Arctic was from the outset concerned with the fragile ecosystems, echoing the feeble intergovernmental institutionalization – the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy – defining the Arctic in international politics in the early post-Cold War years (Tennberg and Keskitalo 2002). As this strategy was given a firmer organizational basis with the formation of the broader mandated Arctic Council in 1996 (Tennberg 2000:120), academics followed suit, branched out, and placed human communities at the centre of a wider approach to sustainable development, including studies of, among others, whaling (Caulfield 1997) and hydrocarbon extr...