Endogenous community development in Greenland: A perspective on creative transformation and the perception of future

• Published in: Polar Science
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: Creative transformation; Endogenous development theory; Hope; Local knowledge; Tradition; Arctic; Greenland; Climate change; Polar Science
• Online Access: https://nipr.repo.nii.ac.jp/?action=repository_uri&item_id=15916; http://id.nii.ac.jp/1291/00015810/

The purpose of this paper is to explore research frameworks for understanding the relationship between northern communities and environmental change, which present an alternative to the currently prevailing concept of resilience. We contribute to a growing literature that identifies a chief problem with resilience thinking— that despite much discussion of modification and flexibility, its application often takes for granted that a community presented with an environmental disturbance will bounce back to an equilibrium. In the context of Greenland and northern communities as a whole, we find need for a framework that better accounts for the complexity of environmental change and dynamic social processes of response, and one that is less conservative in its sense of persistence. With specific emphasis on Tsurumi Kazuko's Endogenous Development Theory, we show how individuals and communities embark on arduous and creative processes of subject formation in order to recover, develop and challenge existing social systems. We explore resonance between Tsurumi's work on human-environment relationships in post-industrial Japan and the current context of Arctic communities responding to ecological and political consequences of climate change. We focus on the entangled nature of community ties to the environment, to others, to self, and to cultural modes of perception. In so doing, we demonstrate research pathways that focus on how residents build hope for future and how a vision for future spreads among a community to actualize an alternative way of life.