Olga Povoroznyuk

Large-scale infrastructures are typically part of development projects that are global in ambition and local in their impacts. While anthropology has a decent track record of using ethnographic methods in the study of infrastructure, it typically lacks the capacity to provoke statements or attitudes regarding larger development plans. Scenario workshops, initially developed by researchers in the field of foresight studies, turn out to be productive tools in eliciting assessments of the present by talking about possible futures. The European Research Council project InfraNorth conducted scenario workshops in two locations in Canada and Norway in 2023, in which four scenarios were presented and discussed. Apart from speculations about what the future might bring, these discussions provided ethnographic insights that went beyond what we had found before through more traditional means of ethnography. We suggest that scenarios and scenario workshops have the potential to offer ethnographic windows into infrastructural presents by talking about the future.

My comparative ethnography focuses on suspended seaport expansion projects in three Arctic coastal communities: Nome (USA), Kirkenes (Norway), and Tiksi (Russia). All three projects are driven by similar development promises and geopolitcal threats, enacting divergent national interests and producing diverse local impacts. While Nome and Kirkenes pursue commercial and tourism-oriented futures, Tiksi remains shaped by military and state-centric imperatives. Across cases, Indigenous and local perspectives reveal tensions between global infrastructure promises, national interests, and lived experiences of marginalization, cultural disruption, and environmental risk. The study conceptualizes infrastructure as a political and social process, arguing that suspended projects continue to generate emotional engagement and social mobilization. On a methodological level, it underscores the value of comparative ethnography and infrastructuring across scales for critical inquiry into local disengagement and disempowerment produced by the globalizing maritime infrastructure.

Permafrost thaw poses diverse risks to Arctic environments and livelihoods. Understanding the effects of permafrost thaw is vital for informed policymaking and adaptation efforts. Here, we present the consolidated findings of a risk analysis spanning four study regions: Longyearbyen (Svalbard, Norway), the Avannaata municipality (Greenland), the Beaufort Sea region and the Mackenzie River Delta (Canada) and the Bulunskiy District of the Sakha Republic (Russia). Local stakeholders’ and scientists’ perceptions shaped our understanding of the risks as dynamic, socionatural phenomena involving physical processes, key hazards, and societal consequences. Through an inter- and transdisciplinary risk analysis based on multidirectional knowledge exchanges and thematic network analysis, we identified five key hazards of permafrost thaw. These include infrastructure failure, disruption of mobility and supplies, decreased water quality, challenges for food security, and exposure to diseases and contaminants. The study’s novelty resides in the comparative approach spanning different disciplines, environmental and societal contexts, and the transdisciplinary synthesis considering various risk perceptions.

Land-based transport corridors and related infrastructure are increasingly extending into and across the Arctic in support of resource development and population growth, causing large-scale cumulative changes to northern socio-ecological systems. These changes include the increased mobility of people, goods and resources, and environmental impacts on landscapes and ecosystems as the human footprint reaches remote, unindustrialized regions. Arctic climate change is also generating new challenges for the construction and maintenance of these transport systems, requiring adaptive engineering solutions as well as community resilience. In this review article, we consider the complex entanglements between humans, the environment, and land transportation infrastructure in the North and illustrate these interrelations by way of seven case studies: the Baikal–Amur Mainline, Bovanenkovo Railway, Alaska–Canada Highway, Inuvik–Tuktoyatuk Highway, Alaska Railroad, Hudson Bay Railway, and proposed railways on Baffin Island, Canada. As new infrastructure is built and anticipated across the circumpolar North, there is an urgent need for an integrated socio-ecological approach to impact assessment. This would include full consideration of Indigenous knowledge and concerns, collaboration with local communities and user groups in assessment, planning and monitoring, and evaluation of alternative engineering designs to contend with the impacts of climate change in the decades ahead.

The Indigenous village of Bykovskiy is located 40 km from Tiksi, the administrative center of Bulunskiy District (Ulus), in the northern part of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutiya), Russia. Founded as a Soviet fishing cooperative, it became home to Indigenous Sakha, Evenkis, Evens, as well as to Russian settlers and political prisoners from the Baltic states. Post-Soviet transformations, coupled with escalating environmental change processes, has been altering the local economy and subsistence activities since the 1990s. Although our interlocutors directly observed and experienced such changes, they seemed to ignore the visible problem of severe coastal erosion that was destroying a local cemetery. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the study region in 2019, and combines approaches from the anthropology of climate change with reception and communication studies. It examines “ignorance” as a strategy of adaptation to multiple stressors under historically reproduced colonial structures of governance.

In pre-Soviet and early Soviet times, the northern areas of East Siberia and the Russian Far East that today are crossed by the Baikal-Amur Mainline were more or less exclusively the domain of semi-nomadic Evenki reindeer herders and rarely traversed by Russian or other European travelers. The decision to build a railroad line through this region during the 1970s and 1980s could not but have tremendous social, demographic, and ecological impacts. The specific impacts of the BAM cannot be understood, however, without considering the political and economic environments in which construction took place. This chapter is based on archival materials and interviews collected during multiple fieldwork visits during the 2010s, with a focus on the city of Tynda, the “capital” of the BAM, as well as the city Severobaikal’sk and the town of Novaia Chara along the railroad, and the Indigenous villages of Pervomaiskoe and Chapo-Ologo located not far from the BAM. The chapter’s aim is to provide tentative answers to the title question and to explore the opportunities and constraints, or “affordances,” of infrastructure as an agent of change.

The town of Tiksi came into being in the 1930s, when the Soviet Union intensified its efforts to industrialize the Arctic. A critical element of that policy was to make the Northern Sea Route a viable Arctic shipping lane and Tiksi, located where the Lena River meets the Arctic Ocean, became an important transportation hub on that route. Post-Soviet transformations led to a rapid decline in population numbers and economic significance of the town, while climate change opened up new opportunities for shipping and mammoth tusk collecting. Today, the situation seems to have stabilized but the promises of a bright future pronounced in strategic papers by the government are yet to be realized. The article explores the socio-economic, infrastructural and environmental changes of recent decades in order to explore future development prospects for Tiksi. The infrastructural legacies of the Soviet past, combined with the environmental conditions of the region, result in the intertwined material dependencies of built and natural environments. Still, these material dependencies are neither straitjackets nor unchangeable. It is the interplay between global climate change, national policies, and local initiative that will challenge the material dependencies of the past and present.