N.Y. Zamyatina & A.N. Pelyasov
Saint-Petersburg: Mamatov Publishing House
In this compact book, N.Y. Zamyatina and A.N. Pelyasov share their more than 15 years of experience in preparing strategies and programs for social and economic development of cities and regions of the Russian Arctic and the North. From the very first pages, they formulate the main principles of their work on the preparation of strategic planning documents for cities, districts and regions of the Russian Arctic and North:
Anzelika Krastina & Anitra Arkko
The viability of Arctic economies depend on many factors. Development and utilization of Arctic human capital can be considered as one of the most important aspects. To move from exogenous towards more endogenous economies, innovation and entrepreneurship are considered to be the key to assuring thriving communities and value creation in the North. (The Arctic Institute, 2017). However, there are certain challenges for entrepreneurship development in particular in the Finnish Lapland and Barents Euro-Arctic regions.
Entrepreneurship is not the first career choice for young people living in the Arctic. They often prefer to move to the south for better job opportunities, lacking a vision of what the North can offer. Training and education can help reverse that situation. Through specific entrepreneurship and innovation courses with appropriate methodology of experiential learning, many young people reconsider a possibility to establish and develop a company in the Arctic. Many good examples and success stories of student-established companies could be linked to the entrepreneurship training activities at the university. But there could be, and should be, more success stories.
Larissa Riabova
The Luzin Institute for Economic Studies of the Kola Science Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences based in Apatity, Murmansk region is going to publish a book summarizing its research on Arctic socio-economic issues in retrospect and prospect.
The book, The Arctic in the Research of the Luzin Institute for Economic Studies of KSC RAS: Thirty Years of Scientific Search, presents a review of the past, present and future research activities of the Institute for Economic Studies (IES) in the field of socio-economic and spatial developments in the Russian and global Arctic. The overview covers the period since 1986 – the year when the IES was established – till 2016. The edition is dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Institute. Until recently, the Institute has been the only academic institution in Russia for Arctic socio-economic research that was located in the Arctic.
Marie-Claude Lyonnais & Christopher Fletcher
The instant global connection afforded by the internet is now so much a part of daily life that it is becoming hard to imagine when it wasn’t. Social media have reshaped the ways we all interact, our relations with kin, the very notion of friendship, the ways we entertain, and the ways we position ourselves as socio-political actors, shifting, in the process, the constraints of time and geography on belonging. In Northern Canada the development of the internet has been slowed by the technological limits associated with a huge area without road or landline connections. In Nunavik, the Inuit land claims region of Northern Québec, where we have been looking at the use of social media as a means to circulate health information, social media have been widely integrated into the lives and homes of people beginning 2010. Facebook in particular is very popular. The low bandwidth required to operate the platform means that it works reasonably well even in an environment where the bandwidth available for a whole community is less than that of a single house in a southern urban center.
Yury Sumarokov
Telemedicine and e-health services are successfully used in the Arctic regions all over the world (Woldaregay et al., 2017). Very long distances and problems of availability of medical services have created the need for wide use of distance technologies and e-health solutions.
Telemedicine in Arctic Russia was introduced in the 1990s. The first Arctic telemedicine network was established with efforts of an enthusiastic team in Arkhangelsk oblast in 1997 (Sorensen et al., 1999). The first network was organized in the framework of international co-operation projects and with the support of the Norwegian Center on Telemedicine (NST) based in Tromsø, Norway (Bye & Manankov, 2007). It became clear that trained staff and quality of communication lines were the main instruments of telemedicine distribution and development.
Ilker Basaran
As a participant to the interdisciplinary Ph.D. and Post-Doc summer school organized by the Norwegian Scientific Academy for Polar Research (NVP), I visited Svalbard this August (2017) and spent 10 busy days attending more than 50 lectures and presentations, talking to experts from all over the world, and finally exploring the place. Here is my observation as a maritime lawyer.
Svalbard
As an IMO-International Maritime Law Institute Ph.D. candidate, I have long been dealing with research related to the Law of the Sea and Arctic Navigation, but unfortunately, I had never visited the Arctic region. Therefore, the invitation from the NVP was a big deal for me. This actually was, without a doubt, the most important occasion of the year. I was so excited to finally get to visit the High North. The destination was Longyearbyen, a town on the island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard Archipelago, Norway. The archipelago of Svalbard is critically located midway between the North Pole and the mainland of Norway.
Designed & hosted by Arctic Portal