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Vi uppmanar regeringen att kraftfullt stärka en grön omställning grundad i demokratiskt deltagande, tillit och långsiktighet. I stället för att se kritik och gnissel som hinder måste regeringen stärka processer för att lyfta fram perifera områdens perspektiv och redan i planeringsstadiet överbrygga orättvisor mellan olika platser och samhällsgrupper regionalt, nationellt och internationellt, skriver ett stort antal forskare.

This article examines how and by whom the future of glacial energy was imagined in Greenland between the 1950s and 1970s, with a specific emphasis on the intersection of discourses of energy and political autonomy. The focus lies on the years from 1953, marking the end of Greenland’s colonial status and its integration into the realm of its former colonial authority, Denmark, until 1979, when the Greenland Home Rule Agreement was enacted. The futures of hydropower are explored through the lens of energy imaginaries, a notion that underscores the interconnectedness between different forms of energy and the organization of social structures. These imaginaries revolving around hydropower circulated in the public-political space in Greenland decades prior to when the first operational hydropower plant came online in 1993. Through a historical empirical analysis, this article identifies the energy imaginaries linked to envisioned hydropower and delineates key phases of their emergence. It also discusses these envisioned futures of hydropower in the historical context of Arctic oil exploration and Greenland’s strivings toward political autonomy. The energy imaginaries of hydropower, especially glacial hydropower generated adjacent to Greenland’s inland icesheet, built on a long-term timeline and autonomous society, in contrast to the oil development that was favoured by Danish authorities at the time. Ultimately, it was the considerations of the sources and scale of the necessary investments that deferred the implementation of hydropower until the late 1980s. However, the groundwork for viewing Greenland’s water resources as a cornerstone for its future independence had been laid.

Climate change requires locally tailored solutions that consider diverse environmental and cultural contexts. This study situates climate action within Sweden's forest landscapes, exploring how local forest stakeholders prioritize and motivate climate action targets for immediate implementation. By engaging in knowledge co-production processes in local communities, we sought to develop place-based climate action pathways, rooted in stakeholders' visions for their communities' futures. We identified three main climate action pathways: forest-based bioeconomy, localism, and global systemic change. These pathways varied in policy targets, governance directions, focus of change, and preferred economic systems. We found that while the pathways generally aligned with the underlying assumptions of overarching scenario archetypes, their ideological differences regarding governance and policy levels and directions were less distinct. Moreover, despite differing foci and perspectives, forest management strategies were similar in all pathways. The ideological dimensions of the climate action pathways became less visible when considering the management of forests. Our findings underscore the embeddedness of local climate action within broader environmental, social, and political structures, and the challenges of linking local landscape understandings to global environmental processes. While practical, locally specific solutions can transcend ideological debates, they may also obscure necessary ideological and political considerations for effective land use and management strategies for climate change adaptation and mitigation.

This study examines the history of oil development in Greenland with a focus on test wells – the physical sites where and when the future of Arctic oil as an energy source was established and eventually abandoned. The processes surrounding the establishment of the first offshore test wells in the 1970s and the first onshore test well in the 1990s illustrate different contexts of oil development, as well as the similarities between the different phases. Looking at these periods through the lens of infrastructural delay, an umbrella concept that unites anthropological analyses of unfinished, delayed or unrealised infrastructure, this study shows how common themes of potential, exploration and verdict emerge that accompanied the establishment of physical test wells. Based on a thematic analysis of historical scientific and policy reports as well as Greenlandic media accounts, this study brings together a top-down and a local perspective on the construction of test wells in the 1970s and 1990s. This study advances research on the history of Arctic oil development by identifying the different phases of its delay that accompanied the creation of its physical infrastructure, each of which generated different social processes of hope and despair, and which also lay the foundation for future perspectives on the use of Greenland’s subsurface beyond oil.

Local actors are recognized as key drivers for climate action. Making climate change relevant and possible to act on in local contexts is thus a critical undertaking for both researchers and society at large. Connecting climate change to people’s known surroundings and experiences, and framing climate action in relation to everyday practices in the local context, might then be crucial to making climate change relevant and actionable on the local level. In this paper, we explore the potential of forests to serve as such a connection. We have worked in close collaboration with a broad range of stakeholders in two case study locations in Sweden to explore potential courses of action for local climate action in relation to forests. We critically analyze these local articulations of climate action and examine the assumptions underlying them, with the aim to assess the effects and consequences of different problem representations. Our results illustrate the challenges of thinking and acting outside of the prevalent business-as-usual or more-of-everything discourses, of recognizing the importance of politics and choice, and of overcoming perceived barriers to action. We find tensions in the allocation of responsibility in both time and space – but also potential room for more local action in assumptions of un- or underused potential for political and civil action on the local level.

Introduction to special issue.

Forest scenario analysis can help tackle sustainability issues by generating insight into the potential long-term effects of present-day management. In northern Sweden, forests provide important benefits including climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, reindeer husbandry, local livelihoods, and recreation. Informed by local stakeholders’ views on how forests can be enabled to deliver these benefits, we created four forest management scenarios: the close-to-nature scenario (CTN) which emphasises biodiversity conservation, the classic management scenario (CLA) optimising the forests’ net present value, the intensified scenario (INT) maximising harvested wood from the forest, and the combined scenario (COM) applying a combination of measures from the CTN and INT. The scenarios were applied to the local forest landscape and modelled over a 100-year simulation period, and the results of the modelling were then evaluated by a diverse group of stakeholders. For most ecosystem services, there was a time lag of 10–50 years before noticeable effects and differences between the scenarios became evident, highlighting the need to consider both the short- and long-term effects of forest management. Evaluation by the stakeholders put the modelled results into a local context. They raised considerations relating to wildlife and hunting, climate change risks, social acceptability, and conflict, highlighting the value of evaluating the scenarios qualitatively as well as quantitatively. Overall, stakeholders thought that the CTN and CLA scenarios promoted more ecosystem services and posed fewer climate risks, while also creating less conflict among stakeholders. Our results emphasise the value of combining scientific and local knowledge when developing and evaluating future forest scenarios.

Integrated approaches to knowledge that recognize meaning, behavior, culture, and systems as domains of knowledge are increasingly employed in holistic views on sustainability transformation but often remain conceptually driven. In this study, we analyze empirical data from a collaborative process with local forest stakeholders in Sweden through the lens of individual, collective, interior, and exterior knowledge dimensions. We show that the participants’ understanding of knowledge about forests and climate change presents a nuanced picture of how knowledge and acting are connected. Meaning-making, cultural frames, and techno-scientific knowledge conceptions converge, interact, and, at times, replace or diminish each other. The connection and interplay of these dimensions, we suggest, can be understood as a knowledge spectrum. These insights into integrated knowledge, based on an empirical case, must be addressed in the production of knowledge, both to grasp the climate and sustainability issues that face us and to support action in response to them.