Abstract
Adaptive capacity in a community context has so far mainly been studied in developing countries as well as indigenous communities in the industrialised world. This article adds to that literature through reviewing studies undertaken in the Nordic countries and Russia, highlighting the ways in which general determinants of adaptive capacity play out in Northern, industrialised contexts. The paper illustrates that the determinants of adaptive capacity in industrialised states exhibit systematic differences from mixed subsistence-cash based communities such as those found in Arctic Canada. We discuss in particular the importance of economic resources in a market-based system, technological competition, and infrastructure, in determining adaptive capacity of natural resource-dependent communities in the Nordic countries and Russia. The paper also illustrates differences in adaptive capacity within the case study region, including between peripheral and central locations with regard to economic resources and diversification possibilities, and between Nordic and Russian cases with regard to infrastructure and technology access. The findings indicate that understanding of determinants of adaptive capacity in resource-dependent communities would benefit from both further contextualisation and broad comparison, across different types of political and administrative systems.
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Notes
However, a qualification must be made here with relevance to the discussion of knowledge and information (under 4.3): while the sectoral and local peripheral studies have mainly taken a bottom-up perspective on local and sectoral knowledge (resultant of the peripheral location of the studies, where interviewees’ assumptions and knowledge could be assumed to differ from literature derived from the centre), the stakeholders involved in the Stockholm study highlighted the perceived requirements for scientific knowledge and access to widened knowledge and perspectives through multi-stakeholder arenas. The study can thus only, to some extent, discuss this factor. The Stockholm study also, to a higher degree, focused on access to scientific information and stakeholder involvement with regard to adaptation policy development in general than the other studies, which given their peripheral character targeted access to information and decision-making at large. This is found also in the discussion of institutional factors under 4.5.
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Keskitalo, E.C.H., Dannevig, H., Hovelsrud, G.K. et al. Adaptive capacity determinants in developed states: examples from the Nordic countries and Russia. Reg Environ Change 11, 579–592 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-010-0182-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-010-0182-9