Sustainability as a Political Concept in the Arctic (Part II)

Restaurant Qooqqut Nuan grows their own vegetables in a greenhouse in Nuuk Fiorth, Greenland. Photo: Ulrik Pram Gad

Following is the second part of the introduction to The Politics of Sustainability in the Arctic: Reconfiguring Identity, Space and Time, edited by Ulrik Pram Gad and Jeppe Strandsbjerg, and published with permission from Routledge Studies in Sustainability. The first part can be read here.

The 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 a number of Arctic countries including Greenland, Norway and Canada, the essays 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, identity and environmental politics.

The Arctic Institute Sustainability in the Arctic Series 2018

• Sustainability as a Political Concept in the Arctic (Part I)
• Sustainability as a Political Concept in the Arctic (Part II)
• Sustainability Understandings of Arctic Shipping
• Breaking Free: Alaska’s Path Forward for Renewable Arctic Energy
• Sustainable Arctic Mining? A Comparative Analysis of Greenland and Nunavut Mining Discourses

When we suggest analysing sustainability as a political concept, we make the claim that the concept intervenes in discursive struggles over the future allocation of rights and resources. This draws on an understanding of politics as a struggle between competing visions for the future.¹⁾Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C (1985): Hegemony and socialist strategy. London: Verso. Palonen, K. (2006): Two concepts of politics: conceptual history and present controversies. Distinktion 12:11–25. Skinner, Q. (2002): Visions of politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Concepts employed to implicitly or explicitly prognosticate and prescribe the future are central means and goals in these struggles.²⁾Koselleck, R. (1985): Futures past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Trib, K., New York: Columbia University Press. And because, in brief ‘[s]ustainability is always about maintaining something’,³⁾Jacobsen, R.B. and Delaney, A.E. (2014): When social sustainability becomes politics: perspectives from Greenlandic fisheries governance. Maritime Studies 13(6). it prioritises the preservation of a particular dimension of life even in the context of an effort of overall change to something better. To unravel the political effects of speaking in sustainability terms, we need to ask specific questions: What is to be sustained? In relation to what? How? As these questions indicate, sustainability is a concept that facilitates and structures a diversity of – partially conflicting, and therefore political – narratives of the future at a series of scales.

The question remains, how do we know sustainability when we see it? Concepts are generally names for things and ideas.⁴⁾Bartelson, J. (2001): The critique of the state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. However, words take on different meanings in different contexts, and similar meanings may be expressed in a variety of words. In principle, this conundrum leaves two diametrically opposed approaches open for the analyst: an onomasiological approach would begin with a specific word (‘sustainability’) and map its different meanings in different contexts, whereas a semasiological approach would begin with a specified meaning and map how this meaning is expressed in various contexts.⁵⁾Elden, S. (2013): The birth of territory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. To illustrate the difference between these two approaches, we can draw attention to how the US Arctic Strategy does not use the word ‘sustainability’ to describe the relationship between development and the environment. However, through a semasiological analysis focused on the meaning of sustainability, we can show how the word ‘conservation’ is related to other words (like nature, culture, community, development) in ways that may (or may not) convey the meaning of the concept of sustainability. A purely onomasiological approach – registering only the use of the word ‘sustainability’ – would not produce a nuanced account of what narratives the concept or idea of sustainability facilitates: the meaning of sustainability can be produced without speaking the word.

When deciding the meaning of sustainability, which we search for in texts, we have to strike a balance between the ways in which meaning is produced both in synchronic and diachronic relations:⁶⁾Saussure, F.E. (1983 [1916]): Course in general linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Roy Harris. La Salle, IL: Open Court. when a concept is used in one context rather than another, it conveys a different meaning, as the concept is related to new things and ideas. So parallel synchronic analyses would show how sustainability does not mean exactly the same thing in, say, UN debates on development aid and in an Arctic business proposal. Meanwhile, a diachronic analysis will show how a concept moving into a new context necessarily carries with it some baggage of meaning, as its relations ‘backwards’ cannot be entirely erased from social memory.

The more central a concept becomes within a certain discourse the more likely it is that it is either taken for granted or implicitly invoked.⁷⁾Bartelson, J. (2001): The critique of the state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moreover, a certain emptying of semantic content appears to be a precondition for a concept becoming central: an ‘empty signifier’ may articulate more different meanings.⁸⁾Laclau, E. (1996): Why do empty signifiers matter to politics? In: Emancipation(s). London: Verso. This does not mean, however, that it is futile to define what sustainability means because, even if the discourse of sustainable development may facilitate the promotion of a variety of mutually contradictory projects and programmes, the concept of sustainability nevertheless plays a similar role in all these narratives, albeit articulating different objects, subjects, and environments. To pin down such a moving target for structured analysis – beyond mere description of how words, meanings, concepts, and contexts are all in flux – the analyst needs to fixate the most important nucleus of meaning of a concept as a criterion delimiting what part of reality should come in focus.⁹⁾Andersen, N.Å. (1999): Diskursive analysestrategier. Foucault, Koselleck, Laclau, Luhman. Frederiksberg: Nyt fra Samfundsvidenskaberne. Hence, the delimitation of a core meaning of the concept of sustainability is pivotal. However, the less the semantic content of a concept is specified in advance, the more open it is to historical inquiry,¹⁰⁾Bartelson, J. (2001): The critique of the state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. so we want to keep our definition as parsimonious as possible, to capture what is core.

The concept of sustainability refers to a relationship between 1. identity, 2. space, and 3. time. Global discourses on sustainable development link humanity at large (or a particular society), that is to develop, with its natural environment that should stay the same.¹¹⁾Lélé, S.M. (2006 [1991]): Sustainable development: a critical review. In: Redclift, M. (ed.), Sustainability, critical concepts in the social sciences, Volume II: Sustainable development. London: Routledge, pp. 165–190. Original source: World Development, 19(6), 1991:607–621. Jacobs, M. (1999): Sustainable development as a contested concept. In Dobson, A. (ed.), Fairness and futurity: essays on environmental sustainability and social justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 21–45. Understood in this manner, sustainability represents a specific way of temporally mediating the relation between society and nature. In its most common articulation with development, sustainability maintains the distinction between identity and nature, claiming that one can develop while protecting the other. When sustainability refers to society as the thing that should be maintained, it does not necessarily entail a shift from nature to identity, but rather a rearticulating of the relationship between the two. Combining sustainability and development invites more complicated stories like ‘changing something progressively over time while at the same time preserving something else’ or ‘changing progressively over time to arrive at a state where this or that can then be preserved’.

As a mediating concept, sustainability points out a referent object – something valuable enough to sustain¹²⁾Lempinen, H. (2017): The elusive social: remapping the soci(et)al in the Arctic energyscape. University of Lapland – and relates it to time and to specific environments (whether conceived as natural or social). At the highest level of abstraction, we define sustainability as the narrative positioning of 1. a given entity and 2. a specified environment in 3. a relation characterized by interdependence successfully sustained over time. Or in plain words: When someone claims that x and y are interacting in a way which may continue without terminating the existence of neither x nor y, their relation is described as sustainable.

Most empirical uses postpone sustainability to the future: They are formulated as ‘sustainability narratives’, i.e. visions, plans, and programmes for how to achieve sustainability. As part of a discourse, sustainability makes specific agents responsible within a specified space, organizes other concepts in coherent narratives, and inscribes specific forms of knowledge with authority. Hence, narratives built around sustainability rather than around another concept ascribe legitimacy to some claims to rights and resources rather than others. In other words, sustainability narratives constitute and empower certain types of actors. However, actors will, in turn, select and seek to manipulate narratives in ways that they find in accordance with their identities, given their perception of competing identities and narratives. The future is never given; rather, a plurality of narratives co-exist, making it a political question which future should unfold and how.

In the attempts to frame and discuss sustainability in the Arctic, we employ the concept of scale. The analytical advantage of scalar analysis is that it highlights the variety of interconnections between different scalar materializations of sociopolitical power.¹³⁾Brenner, N. (1999): Beyond state-centrism? space, territoriality, and geographical scale in globalization studies. Theory and Society 28:39–78. In practice, scales are historically contingent, in principle fluid and malleable, and the very construction of scales is an important part of the politics of sustainability. However, for the most part in the present project, we employ scale in a more heuristic taken-for-granted sense that allows us to discuss the different political effects of sustainability in the encounter between different scales. Actors at one level may be made responsible for making a referent object at a different scale sustainable in relation to an environment at a third scale. On a global scale, sustainability often means something very different than what it does at a state or local scale, and any specific development project (such as mining in, say, Kotzebue, Nuuk, or Lac de Gras) will most likely have consequences (benefits, threats, risks, externalities) on many scales from the global to the local. Moreover, the construction and prioritisation of scales play out surprisingly differently across the Arctic, not least due to differences in how the (post)colonial relations between Southern centres and Northern populations are organised.

Analysing Sustainability Politics

As set out in the opening of this chapter, the overall purpose of this volume is to investigate how struggles over rights and resources in the Arctic are being reconfigured by the concept of sustainability. As discussed in the preceding sections, the concept of sustainability seeks to impose a specific configuration of identity, space, and time on discourse. To distil how this imposition works, the research questions guiding our overall approach to the politics of sustainability in the Arctic are:

• What is it that should be sustained? In other words: what is the identity of the referent object of sustainability?
• In relation to what environment should this referent object be sustained? What space is the referent object dependent on?
• How should sustainability come about? What temporality is produced when sustainability is combined with development (and/or other concepts)?

However, our focus is on the implications of the promotion of conflicting sustainability narratives; conflicting visions of the future, each structured by the concept of sustainability. In other words, our focus is on the interplay between competing claims about how x and y should (adapt to) sustain their mutually dependent existence. Hence, when each chapter approaches a body of empirical material asking ‘What should be sustained? In relation to what? How?’, the chapter is likely to identify more than one narrative. Moreover, approaching texts and practices with this reading strategy allows us to identify when the core meaning of sustainability is shaping them even without explicit use of any of the derivative forms of the word ‘sustain’.

Apart from applying the basic reading strategy, the chapters go about their task in very different ways. We have organized them according to how they weigh their implementation of our analytical strategy. Nevertheless, whether the focus of the chapter’s analysis is initially put on referent object, environment, responsibility, or the conditions for new interventions, in the end they each provide insights related to what sustainability does to identity, space, and time. Hence, they contribute to the overview, established in the concluding chapter, of how the politics of sustainability plays out in some of the most important issues across the Arctic.

Four chapters drive their analysis from a focus on what, according to the Arctic sustainability narratives, should be sustained. Rikke Becker Jacobsen lays out how three competing referent objects for sustainability – stocks, communities, and the public purse – complicates the governance of Greenlandic fisheries. Kathrin Keil surveys interventions on Arctic shipping and finds a surprising array of referent objects for sustainability. Marc Jacobsen compares how minerals extraction in Nunavut and Greenland is meant to serve different purposes – the sustainability of local communities and of the national economy of a nascent state – spurring different sovereignty dynamics. Naja Dyrendom Graugaard investigates how postcolonial sustainability narratives surrounding Inuit seal hunting both depend on and seek to escape colonial ideas of indigeneity.

Three chapters focus on mechanisms for making distinct environments (ir)relevant as part of Arctic sustainability narratives: Frank Sejersen investigates how projects are phased and the social world continuously rescaled to produce sustainability in Greenlandic authorities’ strategy to transform society by inviting in large-scale industries. Elana Wilson Rowe reads Russian policy documents along with political statements of the Kremlin and the RAIPON Indigenous peoples’ organization to find how space is carved up to allow simultaneous protection of some natural environments and development made sustainable with reference to Indigenous social environments. Lill Rastad Bjørst traces how Greenland’s own CO2 emissions – and, hence, its contribution to global climate change severely impacting the Arctic – have been excluded as relevant for sustainable development of the island.

Four chapters focus their analysis on different ways of claiming responsibility and authority in the Arctic in relation to the sustainability of communities and ecologies. Berit Kristoffersen and Philip Steinberg analyse how Norway’s comprehensive Blue Economy initiative appropriates the Arctic Ocean to sustain the legitimacy of the managerial state. Hannes Gerhardt, Berit Kristoffersen, and Kirsti Stuvøy compare how Russia, Greenland, and Norway each re-assert their version of state authority to protect hydrocarbon extraction in response to Greenpeace’s vision of a transnational, networked solution to the global problem of ecosystem and climate sustainability. Ingrid A. Medby explores how Norway, Iceland, and Canada draw on discourses of sustainability when performing legitimacy for their Arctic identity. Kirsten Thisted distils how – even if indigeneity has been a potent signifier in discourses of sustainability – the way in which the Government of Greenland works with the sustainability concept affirms modernity and nation, rather than tradition and indigeneity.

Three chapters, in each their own way, focus attention on the conditions of possibility for new sustainability narratives: Johanne M. Bruun brings to light some of the challenges associated with constructing the Kuanersuit mountain in Southern Greenland as a uranium resource on which current popular and political narratives of economic sustainability in Greenland rely as natural fact. Victoria Herrmann surveys how remote Alaska Native communities seized the transition from diesel fuel to renewable energy as a way to build wider community sustainability. Klaus Dodds and Mark Nuttall trace how a variety of materiality, objects, and networks of knowledge create multiple contexts for ideas about sustainability to emerge, circulate, play out, and make themselves felt, in ways that make sustainability narratives stretch Greenland both geophysically and geopolitically.