Future Regional Development Policy for the Nordic Arctic

This report concludes a three-year foresight process on the topic of future sustainable regional development in the Nordic Arctic (2013–2016), based on the mandate given by the Nordic Council of Ministers’ Committee of Senior Officials for Regional Policy to the Nordic Working Group for Sustainable Regional Development in the Arctic. The mandate has been “to provide input to the further development of the NCM Arctic Co-operation Programme by collecting, reviewing and analysing existing information, assessing different preconditions for future development in the area and developing future scenarios. This will contribute to the political debate and give a more holistic overview of the scientific knowledge in the field.” The Nordic Working Group decided to implement this task by conducting a foresight analysis. To guide the work of the three-year project, three overarching questions were defined for the foresight analysis. 1. What social and resource conditions can be expected to have a decisive influence on regional development in the Arctic over the next 10, 20 and 30 years? 2. How will the management of these conditions affect the living standards and future prospects for the regions? 3. What are the implications of the identified challenges and opportunities for future planning and regional policy? Previous foresight analyses have been carried out for the North Calotte region as part of the broader geographical area of the Northern Sparsely Populated Areas (Gløersen et al. 2009) and for the West Nordic countries (Gløersen, 2012). However, this is the first foresight analysis that covers the Nordic Arctic region as a whole. It has been essential for this study to adopt a bottom-up perspective in the process with participation from citizens of local communities across the Nordic Arctic in the initial vision phase. As part of the process, specific attention has also been paid to youth participation and local and regional business development potential. As a supple- 1. Introduction ment to the foresight analysis, Working Papers have been produced on the topics of youth perspectives on future development (Karlsdóttir and Jungsberg, 2015) and challenges and opportunities for sustainable business development (Olsen et al. 2016).