Great visions – broken illusions

In a commentary first published in High North News, NUPI senior researcher Elana Wilson Rowe reminds that grand projects easily lead to grandiose – and sometimes unrealistic – anticipations in local communities. She indicates this is often the case in the Arctic, with its very nature based economies.  And with deep negative ripple effects on affected residents when the glorious future is cancelled. This, in turn, should make it a key task for investors and policymakers also to communicate the fundamental uncertainties of their projects, Rowe argues.

Commentary: Future imperfect?

It isn’t often that I connect David Bowie and the Kola Peninsula in my mind. However, in the retrospectives of David Bowie’s work following his death, I was struck by a Bowie quotation that had emblazoned the RCA poster advertisements for his 1977 album, Heroes: “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming”.

Bowie’s injunction about listening carefully for the future reminded me of my fieldwork in Murmansk in 2013. The aim of the visit was to follow up with policymakers, representatives of organizations and “everyday” people about what the shelved Shtokman gas project meant to them, in retrospect.

The Shtokman gas field, located in the Barents Sea some 600 km north of the shores of the Kola Peninsula, is one of the world’s largest natural gas fields. Development of the field had been discussed in earnest since the mid-1990s. Anticipation on both sides of the Norwegian/Russian border reached fever pitch around and after 2005. This connected to the dominant policy and media representation of the Arctic at the time as on the cusp of an oil and gas bonanza.  However, exploration of the Shtokman field never got off the ground and the project was officially shelved in 2012. The “shale revolution” in the US drove gas prices down to untenable lows in the target American markets for Shtokman gas.

Crushed anticipations with deep negative ripple effects

So, what do such concretely anticipated futures do for society when they do not actually come about? Do “abandoned futures” still matter? My research in northwest Russia suggests that they certainly do, and perhaps for much longer than we might first think. As one Murmansk resident and businessman put it:

“The oil and gas sector…is somehow virtual in our region. Nonetheless, Shtokman managed to influence our quality of life for the better and for the worse at the same time.”

Interviewees participating in this research project, which was part of a larger project funded by the Norwegian Research Council NORRUSS programme, recalled as negatives inflated apartment prices, overly optimistic personal spending and borrowing, perceptions of increased outmigration/disillusionment amongst young people after the shelving of the Shtokman project and educational choices influenced by the unrealized prospect of a regional oil and gas boom. Many also had positive memories of petroleum companies’ advance engagement in the region, such as support for business alliances and non-governmental organisations, youth engagement, and musical and cultural events.

Cancelled glorious future – negative wherever it occurs

The mixed bag of lasting impacts that Murmansk residents shared during these interviews is likely not unique to the Kola Peninsula or the Shtokman project. Recently, for example, we saw the cessation of Shell’s exploratory activities off the Alaskan coast in late summer of 2015. This news came as such a surprise that many presenters at the September 2015 Alaska Oil and Gas Conference had to apologize for their presentations being, quite suddenly, “out of date.”

There is absolutely nothing wrong with anticipating the future. In fact, one could argue that this is the fundamental task of modern governance and business development. The last century has seen a rise of institutions (consultancies, think tanks) and methods (scenarios, Delphi, forecasting) tasked to consider various futures and map the routes to those futures that seem most desirable. Expectations or ideas about the future then morph into concrete actions that make the predicted future more likely to come about. For example, a state’s ideas about the future influence key decisions on infrastructure, research and innovation budgeting, educational programs, military spending and so on.

Uniqe for the Arctic?

I do wonder if something about the Arctic inspires particularly grand, singular and detailed visions for the future. The idea that the Arctic – as a region – will have its own unique future, distinct from global or national ones, likely relates to long scholarly and literary traditions of Arctic exceptionalism. Heightened focus on envisioning futures probably also stems from the immense uncertainty and magnitude of physical transformation predicted in the region due to global climate change.

Furthermore, as Arctic communities and resources have become incorporated into global capitalist markets, the focus has mostly been on large-scale high- investment development of internationally valued Arctic resources. This kind of ‘single point’ economic development perhaps encourages simple, bold versions of the future. In other words, for the Arctic, we tend to debate whether it will be “oil and gas bonanza” or “post-petroleum”. Rarely do we envision an economic future as complex and multifaceted as those anticipated for southern coastal towns and cities.

Tell the whole story – also the risks

The Arctic landscape is increasingly strewn with unbuilt “ghost projects” or “abandoned futures”. A key task for companies and policymakers promoting these visions of the future is to also communicate about the fundamental uncertainties involved in realizing them, discussing the ways in which anticipation is not the same as prediction or certainty. 

This is important as residents of the Arctic are, of course, continuously drawing upon many sources of information and making their own anticipatory choices about where to live, what kind of education to pursue to what level of optimism to include in a local business plan. I think David Bowie would remind us that tomorrow – like today – will be complicated and will belong to those who listen to all the lyrics, not just the catchy refrain.