Future narratives for two locations in the Barents region

Abstract

What does the future look like from the perspective of municipalities in various locations in the Barents region? What climatic, social and environmental challenges might there be, and how might local people respond? This report documents the results from two workshops held in Kirovsk and Bodø in 2015, addressing above questions. These workshops are part of a series of four workshops across the Barents region with the aim to build visions of different local futures in the Barents region under different climatic and socio-economic contexts. All workshops use the same methodology and research question, and connect local change to global scenarios. A secondary aim of this report is to offer a description of and reflection on the methods employed as a basis for further development of the approach. The method follows a bottom-up, participatory scenario building approach, and is based on identifying local drivers of change which are of especial importance or uncertainty in the region. These locally important drivers are then evaluated in the form of narratives in context of four different global scenarios of alternative futures of societal development, known as the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs). The entire exercise, from driver identification to narrative development, involves a mixture of local actors together with researchers, using knowledge and understanding from both communities. The resulting narratives highlight locally important issues different from pan-Arctic evaluations of future change. They also show that local development is perceived as closely linked to global processes, such as changes related to climate, but especially socio-economic factors such as demography, resource markets or politics.