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

Hunters in Qaanaaq at Thule, Greenland, prefer hunting beluga from traditional qayaks – but ferry them to the hunting grounds on dinghies with outboard motors. Photo: Ulrik Pram Gad

Following is the first 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 second 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

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 prioritising 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’¹⁾Krueger, R. and Gibbs, D. (2007): Introduction: problematizing the politics of sustainability. In Krueger, R. and Gibbs, D. (eds), The sustainable development paradox. New York: The Guilford Press 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 Commission²⁾WCED (1987): Our Common Future, Report from the ‘Brundtland’ World Commission on Environment and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press 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.³⁾Redclift, M. (1987): Sustainable development: exploring the contradictions. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd. 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.⁴⁾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. Kates, R.W., Parris, T.M., and Leiserowitz, A.A. (2005): What is sustainable development? Goals, indicators, values and practice. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 47(3):8–2. 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 characterised as postcolonial: Indigenous peoples hold a prominent place and have comparatively strong organisations in the Arctic.⁵⁾Jacobsen, M. (2015): The power of collective identity narration: Greenland’s way to a more autonomous foreign policy. Arctic Yearbook 2015:102–118. Strandsbjerg, J. (2014): Making sense of contemporary Greenland: indigeneity, resources and sovereignty. In: Dodds, K. and Powell, R. (eds), Polar geopolitics? knowledges, resources and legal regimes. Aldershot: Edward Elgar 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 organises the way Arctic nature and Indigenous identities are presented; it shapes what strategies for the future organisation 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.⁶⁾Krueger, R. and Gibbs, D. (2007): Introduction: problematizing the politics of sustainability. In Krueger, R. and Gibbs, D. (eds), The sustainable development paradox. New York: The Guilford Press 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.⁷⁾Warde, P. (2011): The invention of sustainability. Modern Intellectual History 8(1):153–170 Within this literature, a genre developed advising the head of the household (the Hausvaterliteratur) to cut wood in a durable (nachhaltende) way.⁸⁾Warde, P. (2011): The invention of sustainability. Modern Intellectual History 8(1):153–170. Du Pisani, A. (2006): Sustainable development: historical roots of the concept. Environmental Sciences 3(2):83–96. Petrov, A.N., Burn Silver, S., Chapin III, F.S., Fondahl, G., Graybill, J., Keil, K., Nilsson, A.E., Riedlsperger, R. and Schweitzer, P. (2017): Arctic sustainability research: past, present and future. London: Routledge

From household to globe

Writing before fossil fuel could be utilised, a shortage of timber was predicted,⁹⁾Grober, U. (2007): Deep roots: a conceptual history of ‘sustainable development’ (Nachhaltigkeit) [pdf]. Discussion Papers, Presidential Department P 2007-002. Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB). Available at: https://bibliothek.wzb.eu/pdf/2007/p07-002.pdf (accessed 10 October 2017). threatening the existence of both states (in need of timber for ships) and households (in need of wood for fire).¹⁰⁾Warde, P. (2011): The invention of sustainability. Modern Intellectual History 8(1):153–170. Sustainability would be achieved by ensuring that the harvest of timber was made to balance the growth of new forest¹¹⁾Brander, J.A. (2007): Sustainability: Malthus revisited? Canadian Journal of Economics 40(1):1–38 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.¹²⁾Warde, P. (2011): The invention of sustainability. Modern Intellectual History 8(1):153–170 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.¹³⁾Lumley, S. and Armstrong, P. (2004): Some of the nineteenth century origins of the sustainability concept. Environment, Development and Sustainability 6(3):367–378. Brander, J.A. (2007): Sustainability: Malthus revisited? Canadian Journal of Economics 40(1):1–38. Warde, P. (2011): The invention of sustainability. Modern Intellectual History 8(1):153–170.

However, the defining moment for sustainability as a political concept was the work of the Brundtland Commission.¹⁴⁾Kirkby, J., O’Keefe, P, and Timberlake, L. (1996): Sustainable development: an introduction. In Kirkby, J., O’Keefe, P., and Timberlake, L. (eds), The Earthscan reader in sustainable development. London: Earthscan. 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’,¹⁵⁾WCED (1987): Our Common Future, Report from the ‘Brundtland’ World Commission on Environment and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press has framed both environmentalism and developmental interests ever since.¹⁶⁾Quental, N., Lourenço, J., and Silva, F. (2011): Sustainable development policy: goals, targets and political cycles. Sustainable Development 19:15–29 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.¹⁷⁾Kates, R.W., Parris, T.M., and Leiserowitz, A.A. (2005): What is sustainable development? Goals, indicators, values and practice. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 47(3):8–2 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 delimited¹⁸⁾Kristoffersen, B. and Langhelle, O. (2017): Sustainable development as a global-Arctic matter: imaginaries and controversies. In: Keil, K. and Knecht, S. (eds), Governing Arctic change: global perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 21–42

When social sciences have engaged sustainability debates, what have been called mainstream voices¹⁹⁾Krueger, R. and Gibbs, D. (2007): Introduction: problematizing the politics of sustainability. In Krueger, R. and Gibbs, D. (eds), The sustainable development paradox. New York: The Guilford Press have joined the normative commitment to perfecting the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development,²⁰⁾Sen, A. (2009): Sustainable development and our responsibilities. Notizie di Politeia 26 (98):129–136 identifying problems in terms of lack of sustainability,²¹⁾Parker, J. (2014): Critiquing sustainability, changing philosophy. New York: Routledge and developing and implementing solutions in the form of sustainability.²²⁾Edwards, A.R. (2005): The sustainability revolution: portrait of a paradigm shift. Gabriola Islands: New Society Publishers. Partly in response to this, a critical tradition including postcolonial, Marxist and political ecology voices have insisted on the political effects of sustainable development;²³⁾Bryant, R.L. (1991): Putting politics first: the political ecology of sustainable development. Global Ecology and Biogeography Letters 1(6):164–166 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.²⁴⁾Banerjee, S.B (2003): Who sustain whose development? sustainable development and the reinvention of nature. Organization Studies 24(1):143–180. Sachs, W. (2006 [1990]): On the archaeology of the development idea. In: Redclift, M. (ed.), Sustainability, critical concepts in the social sciences, Volume II: Sustainable development. London: Routledge, pp. 328–353. Original source: The Ecologist, 20(2), 1990:42–43 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.²⁵⁾Beckerman, W. (2006 [1994]): ‘Sustainable development’: is it a useful concept?. In: Redclift, M. (ed.), Sustainability, critical concepts in the social sciences, Volume II: Sustainable development. London: Routledge, pp. 236–255. Original source: Environmental Values, 3, 1994:191–209. 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 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 socio-economic 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.²⁶⁾Steinberg, P.E., Tasch, J., and Gerhardt, H. (2015): Contesting the Arctic: rethinking politics in the circumpolar north. London: I.B. Tauris Global sustainability discourse lists the Arctic among a few iconic biotopes – along with, among others, the rainforest and coral reefs²⁷⁾Gillespie, A. (2009): From the Galapagos to Tongariro: recognizing and saving the most important places in the world. In: Resource Management Theory & Practice. Auckland: Resource Management Law Association of New Zealand, pp. 115–155 – 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 communities²⁸⁾Lorentzen, J., Jensen, E.L., and Gulløv, H.C. (1999): Inuit, Kultur og Samfund. En grundbog i eskimologi. Århus: Systime 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 exploited²⁹⁾Howard, R. (2009): The Arctic gold rush: the new race for tomorrow’s natural resources. London: Continuum and, related, as a matter of global (military) security concern.³⁰⁾Kraska, J. (2011): Arctic security in an age of climate change. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Scholarly writing on sustainability in the Arctic was from the outset concerned with the fragile ecosystems, echoing the feeble intergovernmental institutionalisation – the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy – defining the Arctic in international politics in the early post-Cold War years.³¹⁾Tennberg, M. and Keskitalo, C. (2002): Global change in the Arctic and institutional responses: discourse analytic approaches. In: Käyhkö, J. and Talve, L. (eds), Understanding the global system: the Finnish perspective. Turku: FIGARE, pp. 225–228 As this strategy was given a firmer organisational basis with the formation of the broader mandated Arctic Council in 1996,³²⁾Tennberg, M. (2000): The politics of sustainability in the European Arctic. In: Hedegaard, L. and Lindström, B. (eds), The NEBI yearbook 2000: North European and Baltic Sea integration. Berlin: Springer, pp. 117–126 academics followed suit, branched out, and placed human communities at the centre of a wider approach to sustainable development, including studies of, among others, whaling³³⁾Caulfield, R.A. (1997): Greenlanders, whales, and whaling: Sustainability and selfdetermination in the Arctic. Hanover, New Haven: University Press of New England and hydrocarbon extraction.³⁴⁾Mikkelsen, A. and Langhelle, O. (2008): Arctic oil and gas: sustainability at risk? New York: Routledge

Most of the literature on Arctic sustainability relies on two very different but related storylines: an image of the past in which vulnerable Indigenous communities were challenged by the forbidding Arctic environment; and an image of the present in which modern industrialized extraction, production, and consumption unsettle global climate, Arctic ecosystems, Indigenous cultures, and local communities. When pollution threatens fragile Arctic ecosystems and changes the global climate in ways that spur further regional changes, scholarship often focuses on how particular local ways of living are gilded or threatened.³⁵⁾Berman, M., Nicolson, C., Kofinas, G., Tetlichi, J., and Martin, S. (2004): Adaptation and sustainability in a small Arctic community: results of an agent-based simulation model. Arctic 57(4):401–414. Buckler, C., Wright, L., and Normand, L. (2009): Securing a sustainable future in the Arctic: engaging and training the next generation of northern leaders. Winnipeg, International Institute for Sustainable Development. Available at: https://www.iisd.org/publications/report/securing-sustainable-future-arctic-engaging-and-training-next-generation?q=publications/securing-sustainable-future-arctic-engaging-and-training-next-generation-northern (Accessed 13 September 2018). Anisimov, O.A., Vaughan, D.G., Callaghan, T.V., Furgal, C., Marchant, H., Prowse, T.D., Vilhjálmsson, H., and Walsh, J.E. (2007): Polar regions (Arctic and Antarctic). Climate change 2007: Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, contribution of Working Group II. In: Parry, M.L., Vaughan, D.G., Callaghan, T.V., Furgal, C., Marchant, H., Prowse, T.D., Vilhjálmsson, H., and Walsh, J.E. (eds), The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 653–685 Indigenous people’s experiences with surviving in the Arctic for centuries without undermining their own livelihood endows them a certain legitimacy in discussions about sustainability. However, the normative decision on whether change is sustainable or not relies on how Inuit culture is defined – and often it is defined by Western stereotypes of the Indigenous Other:³⁶⁾Fienup-Riordan, A. (1995): Freeze frame: Alaska Eskimos in the movies. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Ryall, A., Schimanski, J., and Wærp, H.H. (eds.) (2010): Arctic discourses. Newcastle upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bjørst, L.R. (2008): En anden verden. Fordomme og stereotyper om Grønland og Arktis. Copenhagen: Forlaget BIOS. if Inuit are seen as essentially ‘traditional’,³⁷⁾Ford, J. and Smit, B. (2004): A framework for assessing the vulnerability of communities in the Canadian Arctic to risks associated with climate change. Arctic 57(4):389–400 change is necessarily exogenous and potentially damaging.³⁸⁾Cameron, E S. (2012): Securing indigenous politics: a critique of the vulnerability and adaptation approach to the human dimensions of climate change in the Canadian Arctic. Global Environmental Change 22:103–114. If Inuit are defined as part of an ecosystem, Inuit voices advocating socioeconomic change are silenced.³⁹⁾Bravo, M (2008): Voices from the sea ice: the reception of climate impact narratives. Journal of Historical Geography 35(2):256–278. Moreover, the Arctic long ago ceased to be an environment in which Indigenous peoples were the sole actors or even sole inhabitants.⁴⁰⁾Wenzel, G. (2009): Canadian Inuit subsistence and ecological instability: if the climate changes, must the Inuit? Polar Research 28:89–99. Sejersen, F. (2015): Rethinking Greenland and the Arctic in the era of climate change. London: Routledge

So the prominent role of Indigenous peoples in the Arctic does not have one straightforward implication for the politics of sustainability. Quite to the contrary, it gives rise to a series of complications and variations. Questions of how to organize postcolonial sovereignty and statehood are crucial for the political struggles currently unfolding in the Arctic. It is well documented how the Arctic plays a particular role for established national identities of some of the states laying claim to parts of the region.⁴¹⁾Hønneland, G. (2014): Arctic politics, the law of the sea and Russian identity: the Barents Sea Delimitation Agreement in Russian public debate. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Medby, I.A. (2014): Arctic state, Arctic nation? Arctic national identity among the post-Cold War generation in Norway. Polar Geography 37(3). Williams, L. (2011): Canada, the Arctic, and post-national identity in the circumpolar world. The Northern Review 33. Making Northern territories a periphery of Southern states obviously opens up sustainability projects at the national scale. When first contemplating how to implement the Brundtland agenda in the Arctic, one prominent group of academics and diplomats had so little confidence in the state that they advocated philanthropic foundations bypassing Southern capitals by directly sponsoring Indigenous communities – because ‘we’ should learn new directions from them – pursuing their own sustainable development.⁴²⁾Griffiths, F. and Young, O.R. (1989): Sustainable development and the Arctic: impressions of the co-chairs, second session, Ilulissat and Nuuk, Greenland 20–24 April. Working Group on Arctic International Relations, reports and papers 1989-1. In the case of Greenland, the simultaneous presence of formal Danish sovereignty and visions of future Greenlandic independence⁴³⁾Gad, U.P. (2014): Greenland: a post-Danish sovereign nation state in the making. Cooperation and Conflict 49(1):98–118. invites a separate set of struggles over how to scale sustainability. Whereas the creation of new industries is a circumpolar ambition, it is crucial to the Greenlandic debate on how to create a sustainable economy and, hence, make the postcolonial future take the form of a separate state. Whether the state is Southern or Arctic, it needs to legitimize itself by telling stories about how sustainability is secured locally. These stories are intimately entangled with images of what constitutes a legitimate Arctic community: who belongs? Settlers or only Indigenous peoples? How should they live? What combinations of tradition and modernity are deemed sustainable? Such questions reappear in repeated calls for ‘cultural sustainability’ in the Arctic.⁴⁴⁾Søndergaard, J.S. (2017): Noget om aktuelle muligheder for anvendelse af begrebet ‘bæredygtig udvikling,’ når det gælder udviklingen af en ‘Bæredygtig udvikling for et arktisk velfærdssamfund’. Grønland 65(2):118–124. Gad U.P., Jakobsen U., and Strandsbjerg, J. (2017): Politics of sustainability in the Arctic: a research agenda. In: Fondahl, G. and Wilson, GN. (eds), Northern sustainabilities: understanding and addressing change in the circumpolar world. New York: Springer, pp. 13–24. Petrov, A.N., Burn Silver, S., Chapin III, F.S., Fondahl, G., Graybill, J., Keil, K., Nilsson, A.E., Riedlsperger, R. and Schweitzer, P. (2017): Arctic sustainability research: past, present and future. London: Routledge

In order to capture the political significance of all these variations, the following sections first separate the concept of sustainability from the discourse of sustainable development, then explain how we understand and want to analyse ‘sustainability’ as a political concept.

Between environmental and developmental discourse

As the silver anniversary of the Brundtland Report has come and gone, you could build an entire library of texts on the true meaning of sustainable development.⁴⁵⁾Redclift, M. (ed.) (2006): Sustainability, critical concepts in the social sciences, Volumes I–III. London: Routledge It seems well established that getting the concept of sustainability right is important. Both for getting development right and for understanding how it, nevertheless, goes wrong. So, why another volume on sustainability? Because, we argue, despite its growth, the library on sustainability still struggles to capture the political effects of sustainability beyond an affirmative or critical normative stance. Neither rationalistic conceptual analysis nor constructivist discourse analysis accounts adequately for its political effects. As laid out above, either sustainability is seen as a desirable goal, or the concept is identified as playing a negative role. This binary fails to describe the more fundamental political nature of the concept. In making this argument, it is important to assert that the concept of sustainability is not the same as the discourse of sustainable development; it has a distinct effect.

Within the broader literature, a tradition has been established that analyses both environmental and developmental policy as discourse.⁴⁶⁾della Faille, D. (2011): Discourse analysis in international development studies: mapping some contemporary contributions. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 6(3):215–235. Dryzek, J. (2013): The politics of the earth: environmental discourses, 3rd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hajer, M. and Versteeg, W. (2005): A decade of discourse analysis of environmental politics: achievements, challenges, perspectives. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 7(3):175–184. Discourse analysts, particularly developing the Foucauldian approach, have done a convincing job in focusing attention on the importance of language for the formation of environmental and developmental policies.⁴⁷⁾Hajer, M. and Versteeg, W. (2005): A decade of discourse analysis of environmental politics: achievements, challenges, perspectives. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 7(3):175–184. Discourses are basic packages of meaning, more or less tightly sealed, which allow actors to say and do things that make sense to each other.⁴⁸⁾Hajer (1995) points to the role of basic ‘story lines’ in keeping even conflicting positions together within one discourse. Hence, discourses may be simultaneously interwoven and competing, leaving even central concepts contested (Feindt and Oelse 2005:162). Hajer, M. (1995): The politics of environmental discourse: ecological modernization and the policy process. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Feindt, P.H. and Oels, A. (2005): Does discourse matter? discourse analysis in environmental policy making. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 7(3):161–173 Talking about objects, subjects, relations, and trajectories in a specific way makes them meaningful – and it makes them real. Concepts are one type of a wider range of rhetorical devices, which establishes the relations and trajectories of a discourse. For discourse analysts, concepts are little nuclei of meaning, imposing a certain structure on the discourses articulating them. Therefore, it is important to get them right; just as important as getting the discursive construction of objects and subjects right.

Rationalist conceptual analysts agree that getting the concepts right is important. That is what conceptual analysis is about: distilling the precise meaning of a concept, so that it can inform rather than obscure scientific and public debates and policy-making. However, conceptual analysts and discourse analysts disagree on the procedure. For rationalist conceptual analysts, getting a concept right is at heart a logical exercise establishing the correct meaning. For discourse analysts, it is an empirical exercise establishing how the concept is used; meaning what; to what effect. On the one hand, ours is fundamentally a discursive project. As other constructivists, we find that language has important effects on the formation of policy and on the creation of reality as we know it. On the other hand, we find the role awarded to concepts in most discourse analyses on sustainability, Arctic and elsewhere, has been somewhat muted. Granted, it has a huge effect on whether a certain object is ‘allowed’ existence by a discourse: Understanding a fish as part of an ecosystem is something radically different from thinking of it as part of a stock ready for exploitation. Obviously, it has huge political effect whether you are offered the subject position of a savage tribe in need of enlightenment, of an Indigenous people liable for preservation, as a partner for developing politics, or of a nation working towards independence. However, if you think through these examples, you will find that these subject positions and these categories of objects receive much of their meaning from concepts establishing relations and trajectories: enlighten, preserve, independence, system, exploit. In other words, these concepts do things on their own. Over time, they may ultimately be malleable, but immediately when introduced into a sentence or a discourse, concepts carry with them meaning. Some of the most important concepts constitute very basic ideas about how objects and subjects can and do relate, and how relations can and do unfold over time. From this perspective, the composite concept of ‘sustainable development’ is an oxymoron, combining dynamism and stasis.⁴⁹⁾Lempinen, H. (2017): The elusive social: remapping the soci(et)al in the Arctic energyscape. University of Lapland

Development focuses attention on change. It draws on the notion of progress; a basic idea that humans may – individually and collectively – over time, turn into better versions of themselves.⁵⁰⁾Du Pisani, A. (2006): Sustainable development: historical roots of the concept. Environmental Sciences 3(2):83–96 As established by critical geographers, modern development discourse relies on a certain assumption about space as being fixed and operating as a stable background for social practice. Classic development theories such as ‘modernisation’ and ‘stage theory’⁵¹⁾Struck, B., Ferris, K., and Revel, J. (2011): Introduction: space and scale in transnational history. The International History Review 33:4:573–584 operate within a unified and uniform global space without paying historical or theoretical attention to different spatial histories across the globe. Such assumed fixity and stability has in turn allowed academic engagement to ignore the social production of space.⁵²⁾Lefebvre, H. (1991): The production of space. Oxford: Blackwell Related to this problematique, the clear demarcation of a social, human sphere distinct from a natural environment has been thoroughly deconstructed.⁵³⁾Latour, B. (2005): Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor–network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swyngedouw, E. (2007): Impossible ‘sustainability’ and the postpolitical condition. In: Krueger, R. and Gibbs, D. (eds), The sustainable development paradox, New York: The Guilford Press, pp. 13–40. Lempinen, H. (2017): The elusive social: remapping the soci(et)al in the Arctic energyscape. University of Lapland The absence of space has not only been questioned by academics, but also, for example, by non-state actors. Many Indigenous peoples do not apprehend their identity in a way that allows for a separate concept of a natural environment in the same way as Western thought.⁵⁴⁾Bielawski, E. (2003): ‘Nature doesn’t come as clean as we can think it’: Dene, Inuit, scientists, nature and environment in the Canadian north. In: Selin, H (ed.), Nature across cultures: views of nature and the environment in non-Western cultures. Doordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 311–328. Leduc, T.B. (2013): Ancestral climate wisdom: return to a thoughtful etiquette. In Schönefeld, M. (ed.), Global ethics on climate change: the planetary crisis and philosophical alternatives. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 107–120 Furthermore, we like to entertain the idea that the environment has called this absence into question. Understood as such, sustainability is indeed a concept that draws space in as a necessary dimension of political and economic theory.

If development is relational, this quality is secondary – relationality only appears by comparing entities as to their state of development. Sustainability, on the contrary, focuses attention on what should not change – and as a concept, it is relational before anything else. It claims that an object, a subject, or a process relies on its environment, so that both need to be taken care of if the existences of either are to continue. Possibly, the paradoxes and detours of politics of ‘sustainable development’ – but also its proliferation and success in framing debates, projects, and policies – comes from the paradoxical combination of change and constancy in this discourse. On its own, ‘sustainability’ is a question of ‘preserving something in its relation to something else’. Combining with development compromises, supplements, or complicates the temporality of sustainability.

In this volume, we focus on what the concept of sustainability does. First and foremost, what it does in and to the discourse of ‘sustainable development’, because this is where the concept is most explicitly highlighted these days – whether it is allowed to do its work or it is in effect submitted to development. But also what the concept of sustainability does when appearing ‘on its own’. Because, even if this work is less conspicuous, the very basic idea of continued mutually dependent co-existence between an object and its environment (natural or social) may be found way beyond the sustainable development discourse. And it is this quality of being a well-known rhetorical figure that makes it possible for ‘sustainability’ to be attached to surprising relations – and which, in turn, produces some of the surprising twists and turns of the composite discourse of ‘sustainable development’.