Report summary: Russia has identified the Arctic as both a strategic priority and a resource base for the 21st century. Against a backdrop of expectations about the opportunities available in the Arctic, Russia has primarily pursued a policy focused on strengthening national sovereignty in the region. However, despite the considerable attention given to the development of the Arctic by the Russian leadership, progress in achieving Russia’s goals in the Arctic has been slow.
While debate has increased in the media and research community with regard to China’s potential as a partner for development of the Arctic, significant challenges stand in the way of a major reorientation of Russian Arctic policy
towards China. The success of Russia’s recent energy cooperation with China will depend on solving previous problems, developing mutually acceptable forms of cooperation and increasing mutual trust.

The report was authored by Ekaterina Klimenko as part of the Mistra Arctic Futures: Managing Competition and Promoting Cooperation project. Ms Klimenko will continue her research into Russian and Chinese policies, investments and other activities in the Arctic as part of the Mistra Arctic Sustainable Development programme.

The full report is available for free download from SIPRI.

The Arctic is changing rapidly, and has become a focal point in geopolitics. Sweden, one of eight Arctic states, needs to increase its knowledge base to support political decision-making that acknowledges political, strategic and environmental issues. From a global perspective, we must work towards Arctic change that is politically, economically, socially, and environmentally viable. Today, we face major environmental challenges that cannot alone be solved by existing science, policy and economic approaches.

The need to invest in social sciences in the Arctic was becoming evident in the 2000s, and in 2011, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (MISTRA) made a three-year investment of 38 million Swedish crowns in the programme “Mistra Arctic Futures in a Global Context.” The programme consisted of five distinct projects, each with its own internal project management, involving researchers based at universities, independent research institutes (non-governmental organization ‘think-tanks’) and consultancies, and rooted in the social sciences and the humanities.  From 2011 to 2013, 61 researchers based in 10 countries – including 7 Arctic nations– participated in the Mistra programme. Participants included 35 women and 29 men, with an equal gender distribution in leadership positions.

The Mistra Arctic Futures final report is now available for download. It contains overviews of the projects, examples of the research output and a detailed inventory of the publications and other knowledge products resulting from the programme.

Mistra Arctic Futures Final Report

Scott Cole, Sergei Izmalkov and Eric Sjöberg published an article based on their work in the Mistra Arctic Futures in a Global Context project ‘Arctic Games’ in the well-respected open access journal Polar Research.

In the article they illustrate the benefits of game theoretic analysis for assisting decision-makers in resolving conflicts and other challenges in a rapidly evolving region. They review a series of salient Arctic issues with global implications—managing open-access fisheries, opening Arctic areas for resource extraction and ensuring effective environmental regulation for natural resource extraction—and provide insights to help reach socially preferred outcomes. They provide an overview of game theoretic analysis in layman’s terms, explaining how game theory can help researchers and decision-makers to better understand conflicts, and how to identify the need for, and improve the design of, policy interventions. They believe that game theoretic tools are particularly useful in a region with a diverse set of players ranging from countries to firms to individuals. They argue that the Arctic Council should take a more active governing role in the region by, for example, dispersing information to “players” in order to alleviate conflicts regarding the management of common-pool resources such as open-access fisheries and natural resource extraction. They also identify side payments—that is, monetary or in-kind compensation from one party of a conflict to another—as a key mechanism for reaching a more biologically, culturally and economically sustainable Arctic future. By emphasizing the practical insights generated from an academic discipline, we present game theory as an influential tool in shaping the future of the Arctic—for individual researchers, for inter-disciplinary research and for policy-makers themselves.

The full article can be accessed here

Mistra Arctic Futures and Mistra Arctic Sustainabilities are co-presenting a plenary panel at the International Congress of Arctic Social Scientists VIII. The purpose of this panel is to present insights from some of the projects in the initial Arctic Futures program, as well as goals for the subsequent initiative, in order to provoke discussion of lessons from the role of social sciences and the humanities in Arctic sustainability research. The presentations will highlight the theoretical and empirical outcomes of the initial Mistra program and how these will inform research in the new initiative. It will also address two challenges with considerable relevance to the future of the Arctic – working in an interdisciplinary program in the context of the increasing importance of ‘strategic environmental research’, and working in a situation where the funder has expectations on results being directly useful for policy processes and stakeholders. A livestream is available at www.unbc.ca/livestream and we will also upload the presentation afterwards.