Framing and Governing Climate Change and Environmental Problems in the Urban Arctic

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.