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Arctic unity, Arctic difference: mapping the reach of northern discourses

Since the end of the Cold War, cooperative and region-building endeavours involving Arctic governments and peoples have flourished. These efforts have been rooted in a desire to pursue northern sustainable development and in assertions about the shared experiences and values of Arctic states and peoples. In this paper, a case study is presented concerning a Canadian development project designed to promote Canadian sustainable economic development models to indigenous and non-indigenous leaders and bureaucrats in the Russian north. In their efforts to move knowledge across northern borders, the Canadian project team relied clearly upon two central discourses of the Arctic region-building process: a common Arctic space and the shared pursuit of sustainable development. Drawing upon over thirty qualitative interviews and a year of participant observation at project events, the aim of this article is to map the currency and reach of these Arctic regional discourses at a more ‘local’ level amongst the Russian and Canadian Arctic residents involved in the project. The continuing debate during this development project over what Arctic regionalism and sustainable development mean in practice calls into question a key assertion of contemporary region-building rhetoric, the assumption or hopeful injunction that not only is a regional landscape or environment shared but that values and experiences are, or will come to be, shared as well.