Sustainability Lecture: Community Health and Sustainability in Arctic Alaska

Scenarios have been a tool of business for half a century. Companies gain the capacity to think ahead in rapidly changing complex competitive environments and make crucial decisions in absence of complete information about the future. Currently, at many regional scales of governance there is a growing need for democratically legitimate tools that enable the actors at local-scales to address pressing concerns in the midst of uncertainty. This is particularly true of areas experiencing rapidly changing environments and complex social problems. Resilience theory and deliberative democracy both promote governance by informed actors in an effort to produce decisions that avoid social-environmental collapse. This talk represents the first set of results from two projects from Alaska’s Arctic Slope region. Resident expert participants from the Northwest Arctic and North Slope Boroughs addressed the focal question “What is needed for healthy sustainable communities by 2040?” The results contribute to a truly multi-disciplinary cross-cultural discussion of the importance of innovative Indigenous thinking at the local scale in a rapidly changing Arctic.