Conveners: Peter Sköld, Umeå University with Cécile Pelaudeix, Aarhus University as co-convener
The concept and practice of sustainable development as guiding institutional principle, as concrete policy goal, and as focus of political struggle remain salient in confronting the multiple challenges of the new global order in the Arctic. How sustainable development is conceptualized and practiced depends very much of how it is embraced by scholars, policy makers and people in the Arctic.
This session aims to address various perspectives on sustainable development in the Arctic, including the now traditional areas of environmental protection, economic growth, and social equity. We welcome contributions that are concerned with the local communities, the oceans and the global Arctic, and the relation between them. The plurality of the Arctic is important to illustrate, and we are also interested in the development of comparative approaches between states or regions as well as trans-disciplinary approaches including both natural and social sciences in the session. As always, climate change, policy strategies, security, natural resource development, and human capacity building are of great interest. We value contributions focusing on indicators for sustainability, and on the analysis of its normative substance and the constraining as well as enabling effect of the concept on policy making.
There are many aspects of sustainability, with this session we hope to bring together scholars that can highlight its complexity as well as its importance. Thus we also welcome presentations on resilience, adaptation, traditional and local knowledge, and indigenous peoples.