This presentation will discuss why Arctic cities initiate climate change adaptation policymaking. It will focus on comparing the framing of climate change and environmental issues, as well as state-city and city-expert climate adaptation policymaking interactions in Murmansk (Russia) and Tromsø (Norway). In both cases, the national government maintains a presence in local environmental policymaking by enacting laws and allocating financial assistance to municipalities. However, the differences in discourses on climate change and environmental problems across the municipalities derive from a synthesis of local authorities’ perceptions impacted by political, geographical, and climatic contexts.
Speaker:
Nadezhda Filimonova is a research fellow at the Harvard University Belfer Center Arctic Initiative and an affiliated scholar at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies. Filimonova earned a PhD at the University of Massachusetts Boston in November 2022. She was awarded a Fulbright fellowship, a German Academic Exchange Service fellowship, and numerous research grants. Filimonova is the author of several peer-reviewed publications on geopolitics and governance in the Arctic. Her current research explores urban governance for resilient cities in the Arctic.
Moderator:
Robert Orttung is a Research Professor at IERES and the Director of Research for Sustainable GW. He is editor of Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Demokratization and co-editor of the Russian Analytical Digest. His research focuses on issues of urban sustainability in the Arctic.