Time, idealisation and international development: promoting Canadian co‐management in northern Russia

• Published in: Area
• Main Author: Wilson, Elana
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2007
• Subjects: Russian North
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2007.00758.x; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fj.1475-4762.2007.00758.x; https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2007.00758.x

In this article, I trace the efforts of a development team working to promote a Canadian approach to natural resources management in the Russian North. These development workers used two communication strategies related to time and history to render Canadian knowledge mobile and applicable to a new location: (1) imagining today's Russian North as equivalent to the Canadian northern past and (2) reframing and idealising the Canadian past and present to make the governance export less discursively ‘messy’ for an outside audience. The relative failure of these communicative strategies points to the need for richer dialogue in efforts to move knowledge cross‐culturally.