This article examines how Arctic governance is discursively constituted through national Arctic policy and strategy documents and how these discursive constructions differentiate governance roles between Arctic states and Arctic Council observer states. Rather than treating national strategies as neutral policy instruments, the study conceptualizes them as political texts that articulate authority, responsibility, and legitimacy within an asymmetrical governance system. Methodologically, the article employs qualitative discourse analysis of the most recent official Arctic strategies of eight Arctic states and twelve observer states. Using MAXQDA (version 24), the analysis is organized around six thematic domains: security policy; climate change and environment; international cooperation; resource management; Indigenous peoples and rights; and economic development and sustainability. The findings reveal a high degree of discursive convergence across both actor groups, particularly around climate change, sustainability, environmental protection, and cooperation. However, this convergence does not indicate substantive policy alignment or egalitarian governance. Arctic states frame governance through narratives of sovereignty, stewardship, and regulatory responsibility, while observer states construct legitimacy through scientific contribution, multilateralism, and normative alignment. The article argues that discursive convergence can function as a kind of governance infrastructure that enables participation while tending to stabilize asymmetrical authority.
This paper examines the lived health impacts of climate change in Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, with attention to permafrost degradation, housing instability, food insecurity, water contamination, ecological change, and gendered caregiving burdens. Grounded in decolonial, Elder-guided, and land-based research approaches, the study draws on conversational stories shared by ten Elders and Knowledge-Keepers during a three-day gathering in Inuvik in August 2024. Rather than treating permafrost thaw as only a technical or environmental problem, the paper examines how climate-related disruptions are experienced through bodies, homes, food systems, water relations, cultural continuity, and psychosocial well-being. The findings show that Elders connect thawing ground, declining traditional foods, changing species patterns, industrial contamination, chronic and unfamiliar illnesses, and ecological grief as interconnected dimensions of climate-health vulnerability. The paper contributes to Arctic climate-health scholarship by engaging recent Inuvialuit Settlement Region research while foregrounding Indigenous knowledge, relational accountability, and community-defined research priorities. It calls for Indigenous-led climate-health surveillance, gender-responsive adaptation, stronger water governance, and policy approaches that understand environmental, human, animal, and cultural health as inseparable.
Arctic tourism is increasingly shaped by Arctification, a process through which stereotypical representations of the Arctic as a remote, snow-covered wilderness are attached through tourism and related imaginaries, practices, and products to places that were not previously considered as being Arctic. These representations can contribute to homogenization, and constrained development pathways. While sustainability needs have been widely examined in Arctic tourism, the role of digital technologies in shaping how Arctic places are produced, experienced, and rendered sustainable remains under-researched. This conceptual paper introduces Phygital Arctic Tourism (PAT) as an analytical framework for examining how Arctic tourism is assembled through intertwined physical and digital processes. Building on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and relational perspectives on place, the paper extends existing Arctic tourism frameworks by conceptualizing digital technologies as material actors in the production of tourism experiences, imaginaries, and sense of place. Furtheremore, it introduces Counter-Arctification as a concept foregrounding processes through which dominant Arctic imaginaries are challenged and pluralized. With examples from museums and visitor centers this paper advances a conceptual lens for analyzing how Arctic tourism is produced, mediated, and transformed in the digital era, offering new directions for research on sustainability, sense of place, and tourism development in Arctic regions.
