"Prudent development": the (r)evolution of the Arctic energy concern the 2007-2017 Arctic Energy Summit Reports

In political, popular and scholarly debates alike, the Arctic region is seen as about to become the world’s new energy province. Increasing global energy consumption, dwindling reserves and political instabilities at existing production sites, a warming climate and technological developments all push energy production activities farther and farther toward the previously inaccessible North. Once extracted, these resources are reserved a crucial role in feeding the “energy-hungry world.” Meanwhile, considerably less attention is devoted to energy-related questions within the resource-exporting region.
I will therefore focus explicitly on the ways in which the regional energy concern has been conceptualized from and for the Arctic region. Making use of the final reports from the 2007–2017 Arctic Energy Summits, a series of high-level science and policy meetings affiliated with the Sustainable Development Working Group of the Arctic Council and with an aim to highlight the regional dimensions of Arctic energy, the chapter scrutinizes the regional energy concern as it has been depicted and constructed from within the region during the last decade. I will hence analyze the ways in which the social dimension of energy in the Arctic region is framed and how the oftentimes conflicting dynamics of benefits and losses as well as the desires and fears entwined with producing and consuming energy keep being navigated and negotiated in the circumpolar North.