Linking global/spectacular issues to Local/ Modest Concerns

avenue 4: Linking global/spectacular issues to Local/ Modest Concerns

Transportation modes are complementary, and people generally use the same transportation infrastructures. However, several polar actors such as multinationals, wealthy hunting/fishing outfitters and army forces have their own transport infrastructure. Transportation networks can be considered on

a regional basis, but travellers and traders often do not pay attention to these political limits. In the long term, transportation systems and infrastructures represent capital for those who build them and a source of challenges for those who inherit them. Who is going to benefit from good infrastructure tomorrow? Who is going to suffer from a dangerous network, and who will have to cope with the environmental impact of transportation? Who will have better access to resources and services? Who will profit from the effects generated by transport? All these questions are linked. Transport planners concentrate only on a few ‘strategic corridors’ while geopoliticians focus only on international transportation conflicts. But, then again, the issue of managing the capital of transportation systems remains. In the Arctic, as in other regions, the modest infrastructure must be seen as part of a bigger system and the mobility of local actors as part of the geopolitics of well-being. In this geopolitics, the actors negotiate projects and services while institutions at different levels of governance spend a great deal of time, energy and money to reconcile divergences and mediate conflicts. However, transportation systems in the Arctic appear rapidly in their international dimension. A project for a new mining road in Sweden may quickly be considered to have a big impact on the transport logistics of northern Russia or even China, while a new legal agreement with an Aboriginal community in Alaska concerning the construction of a pipeline may be considered as a model for further transportation development in Labrador. Transport planners, policy makers and mobility researchers must consequently re-think polar transportation as a system in its holistic dimension.

avenue 5: simplify the reading of transportation plans by using simple tools (posters) and presenting them as they really are: narratives

Planning tools are often designed by practitioners with extensive technical experience. They are the product of a long process and complex engineering. Transport strategies may appear to citizens to be long, mind-numbing documents. Conversely, shorter versions may look like the meaningless result of political marketing. To be understandable and satisfactory to all stakeholders, transportation plans must be readable by all. One possible strategy for planners to ensure common understanding is to develop visual tools offering a comprehensible synopsis of transport planning at a glance, for instance, on a poster or a series of posters.

Such a tool should be easily modifiable and easily revised over time according to the evolution of planning. Progress should be noticeable: which interventions have been successfully completed, which ones have not yet been accomplished, which ones have been abandoned, and which ones are under development. Transport planners can then add new projects and mention new constraints. Transportation plans should also be honest and assert, without hiding anything, what they really are: narratives. All stakeholders should be able to assess the story which is told and identify who the subjects are, the objects, the helpers and the opponent, the senders and receivers of the planning quest. People of the Arctic might be able to understand in what way the region is a general receiver (that will benefit from the quest) and whether the subject will be able to accomplish its mission. They must be able to confront the narrative of “their” transportation plan with their own projected narrative. This situation is also true at the pan- national level, for example, in the Barents Region. The fact that people from dif- ferent cultures and countries are working on the same narrative constitutes a sup- plementary challenge, but also justifies the development of simplified tools with which everybody can understand the direction taken. With Arctic sustainability as the object of the narrative of transport planning, people from the Arctic would also benefit from telling their own narrative about the future to decision-makers at the national level of governance. In short, they may make clear for themselves why planning sustainable transport in the High North is different and requires different tools from those used in other regions. The national decision makers may then negotiate this narrative with other decision makers.