| Summary: | We live in an ever-changing environment: globalisation is moving forward rapidly; the effects of Climate Change can be felt worldwide, anthropogenic resource extraction is ongoing and global pandemics are bringing up unexpected challenges. Evidence of these changes are everywhere, but significantly the polar regions are dramatically affected and aspect of geopolitical interest. Until now, little emphasis has been put on understanding Arctic communities’ transformations and their livelihoods due to those accelerating changes.One of these polar regions is the northernmost town of the world, Longyearbyen, on the Archipelago of Svalbard, governed through Norway under the ‘Svalbard Treaty’. The town is transforming from a mining-based community towards a service-based community, focusing on tourism, research and education. As Norway only holds sovereignty over the Archipelago but all signatory countries of the Treaty hold equal commercial rights over the island, the place is caught between geopolitical visions and local reality. The thesis at hand questions how the future of Longyearbyen is imagined in the face of accelerating global and local challenges. Based on the theoretical framework of imaginaries and explicitly Arctic imaginaries, the research uses a form of discourse analysis to investigate those. The discursive approach by Bacchi called “What’s the problem represented to be?” (WPR) was applied as a method to simplify the critical analysis of public policies. The latest policy on Svalbard’sfuture development, “The White Paper for Svalbard” from 2016, was critically examined, which presentsa clear governmental imaginary to maintain Norwegian communities on the Archipelago. Following the WPRapproach, it has further been analysed how that governmental imaginary has historically come about. In the last step, an extensive media analysis was conducted to examine how the governmental imaginary has developed, been questioned or disrupted by other emerging local imaginaries. This research portraits the common ...
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