Arctic Social Indicators (ASI) Workshop
University of Roskilde, Denmark
Building 02
June 8-10, 2007
Second International Workshop
Minutes
Friday, June 8.
8:30 AM Welcome and introduction
Rasmus Ole Rasmussen: Welcoming participants to the University of Roskilde
Joan Nymand Larsen: Introduction to ASI project, brief overview of first workshop, and update from Arctic Council meeting
Peter Schweitzer: ASI project and work that lies ahead
Introduction of participants
9:15 AM Invited 10 minute presentations
Jack Kruse & Birger Poppel: SLiCA data and relevance for ASI
Gunn-Britt Retter: ASI Presentation
Tatiana Vlasova: Integrated Arctic Social Observation System: main directions of the work and possible cooperation with ASI
Solveig Glomsrød: ECONOR (Follow-up of the ECONOR project Presentation prepared for the SDWG meeting in Tromsø, April 2007:
10:30 AM 10 minute presentation/updates by team leaders, and brief discussion:
Fate Control (Gail Fondahl)
Cultural Viability (Peter Schweitzer)
Closeness to Nature (Leslie King)
Material Well-Being: (Joan Nymand Larsen)
Education (Rasmus Ole Rasmussen and Ray Barnhardt)
Demographic and Health Indicators (Larry Hamilton)
Brief Plenary Continues after lunch:
Break out session: Participants meet in individual domain groups. Task: continue
work on indicators (e.g. identification and discussion of indicators, criteria,
testing, consultation, problem areas, etc.).
4:45 PM Plenary: Brief reports on progress
Health/Demographics (Larry H)
Education (Rasmus)
Material Well-being (Lee)
Closeness to Nature (Leslie)
Cultural Viability (Peter S)
Fate Control (Jens)
Saturday, June 9 : Break out session continues
1:15 PM Plenary: Brief reporting and discussion
2:00 PM Break out session continues
Saturday closing session
Health/Demographics (Larry H)
Education (Rasmus)
Material well being (Lee)
Fate Control (Gail)
Cultural Continuity (Yvon)
Ties to Nature (Leslie)
Sunday, June 10
ASI Domain Group Closing Presentations
Fate Control (Gail)
Cultural Well-being. (Yvon)
Closeness to Nature (Leslie)
Material Well Being (Lee)
Education (Rasmus)
Health and Demography (Larry H)
Friday, June 8.
8:30 AM Welcome and introduction
Peter Schweitzer
Good morning. It’s a little after 8:30 but we’ll pretend it’s 8:30 – Peter
Schweitzer, first order of business is to give our local host an opportunity to
welcome us.
Rasmus Ole Rasmussen:
Welcoming participants to the University of Roskilde
Thank you all for coming and thank you for the nice weather. It’s supposed to be
29 today and even hotter in the next couple days so I think we will have a hot
topic and good time. My name is Rasmus Ole Rasmussen – I am with the Department
of Geography. I will take this opportunity to welcome everyone and hope you have
a nice time. I would also like to say something about where we are. This is
Roskilde University Center. The logo is a coral. In Latin is says “In silence is
death and in movement is life.” This University has changed constantly and it is
by changes we will be able to promote life here. Roskilde University was
established in 1972 and there was a political movement behind establishing this
as a university center.
The purpose was to enable working and middle class children to get into a
university career by opening this mouldy old place and instead bring life into
the university and bring the university into life. So the focus was on pedagogy
and how to enable children from families with no former educational focus or
reading and writing. The model was liberalization of studies with new forms
which focused on projects—not reading heavy books. By looking into problems that
could be bounded as a project and then by studying the project and make the
connection with the real world. Problem solving is one of the most important
questions or characteristics of the students of this place dealing with real
world projects, not ivory tower issues. To enable students with no former
academic insights, working in groups to learn from each other and draw from
whatever qualities the students have there – learning by doing and learning by
interaction.
It is or was established as a university centre not a traditional university in
order to combine both long term and medium-long term studies here. Teachers
training and social workers training and long range of academic activities.
In 1976 the place was turned into a more traditional university in a sense with
no medium-long range studies. But we have maintained the name. In Aalborg, where
Gorm comes from, the name has been changed from University Centre to University.
We have maintained the name and are hoping others will be able to maintain the
activities.
The new study structure was based on expecting that young people coming from a
working class environment wouldn’t know why and how to study. The first two
years they study basic studies: such as humanities and social science. Then they
go into group work and interdisciplinary studies. When leaving here they will
have a formal education within two disciplines because real world problems are
not necessarily disciplinary.
The social unit at the university is a house. It is a social framework for
studies and activities. The usual house size is 120 students and 5-6
supervisors. This house we’re using for our meeting is bigger because there are
more technical facilities and more staff here. But there are still us, but
basically and more staff but there are around 120 students in these types of
houses. Each house has a kitchen, a lecture room, a number of group rooms and a
secretary for the house that takes care of academic and social activities and
problems in the house.
Roskilde University’s house system was established in 1972 and became popular
among the students and more radical students especially so it was quickly known
as the “Red place or communist nest. The first rector was hunted out of here
because he was asocial democrat and didn’t necessarily agree with student
socialism. In 1975 there were objections that it was dangerous to have those
kinds of educational facilities around. The right side of the parliament
suggested that this should become a mental institution. It survived as a
university with just one vote. It was suggested that in doing studies, whether
Marxist or radical, students might learn skills useful in real life. There were
some adjustments made. Instead of interdisciplinary institutes, ten distinct
disciplinary institutes were established and students were required to take more
coursework. It became 50/50 courses and projects. In the beginning it had been
possible to go through just by accomplishment of projects and written reports.
In 2006 new directions came up – more toward interdisciplinary studies and doing
research and teaching across themes. Today there are six departments – the
department of environmental and social spatial change is where we are today.
ENSPAC. It’s one of the cross-cutting issues at the university.
So much for the background and you have obviously found out where it is. We’re
not that far from Roskilde. In the history here, when Roskilde University was
established on a fair field, the idea was that Roskilde would develop in this
direction. Instead, Roskilde has grown in the other direction. 10 years ago we
got the station up there – until then people had to go to Roskilde and then take
a bus. Some of the basic ideas of the university and its position in Roskilde
are being realized. We are in building 2 and just before lunch I’ll give you
additional information – I’ll tell a little more about the group rooms building
1 has a nice cafeteria for sweets or beverages. There is also a bookshop –
generally a nice bookshop. Lunch today, Monday and Tuesday are through building
1 to what is a very big teaching room and our lunch will be out there. We’ll
have lunch here in our canteen for the weekend.
It’s a very nice library and I suggest you take a walk around the campus area.
For many years it was just this inner part but during the past 10 years it has
grown and is quite a nice campus. That’s it. Once again welcome to the
university and these facilities.
Joan
Thank you to Rasmus Ole for all these maps.
Leslie
How unique is this structure in universities in Denmark?
Rasmus
Aalborg is having a similar experience. It seems we were unique, but more and
more in the universities throughout Denmark it appears this is becoming more and
more the way to go.
Joan Nymand Larsen:
Introduction to ASI project, brief overview of first
workshop, and update from Arctic Council meeting
Today our group has mushroomed into a large group – 32 today – in addition there
are some who couldn’t join us – with very interesting representations and
backgrounds in disciplines. Hopefully that means exciting work coming out of
this. There are three categories of people here. Those who were in Akureyri and
those who have been part of this project since day 1 who were not in Akureyri
and about 10 people who are new to the project. So because of that, I would like
to give a brief introduction to the project so the newcomers can get up to
speed. For some of you it’s a rerun.
I’m Joan Larsen from Stefansson Arctic Institute in Akureyri, Iceland. Peter
Schweitzer is co-leader for the project. What we are here for this weekend (and
thank you for coming by the way) is to continue our important work on
construction of arctic social indicators. For those of you who were in Iceland,
you will see pictures from our days in Iceland. Our project on Arctic Social
Indicators was born out of an identified need in the AHDR. The AHDR came out in
2004 and in that report various gaps in knowledge were identified including the
“need to construct indicators” to track and monitor development in the arctic
over time. The ambitious goal was to create the indicators we didn’t have the
time or money to create from scratch. This project is a follow up to the Arctic
Human Development Report to try to fill the gaps identified in that report. One
of the original recommendations of that report was to construct a small set of
practical indicators. We hope to get down to a small set of 4-6 indicators that
our report can recommend as a collective tool to help people say they can see a
picture of where human development is as at.
It is an Arctic Council endorsed project – within the Sustainable Development
Working Group. I was recently in Norway at the AC meeting and there is a lot of
excitement and some great expectations of this project. Many people mentioned
this project and are expecting it to be received positively like the AHDR. The
main objective is to devise a limited set of indicators to monitor key aspects
of human development. The Sustainable Development Working Group will bring this
work forward to policy makers. We have a wide audience, as you all know: a wide
range of stakeholders; the residents of the north; policymakers; and the Arctic
Council. The targeted audience is same as AHDR and the AHDR is a model for the
kind of project we are aiming at. We also hope that when the ASI report comes
out that it may be of relevance as curriculum in colleges and complement the
AHDR.
I stated on this slide that our group had about 30 participants, but I think we
have surpassed that number now. We have a lot of new members; interesting new
members; including additional indigenous members and more Russians on board.
We’ll all get a chance to introduce ourselves to each other soon. We have 3
graduate students. That was something we were missing at our fist workshop. Now
we’re covered all the way through. Then, of course, we are collaborating with
other projects. The Arctic Council and funding agencies asked us to do that.
They include: ArcticStat; Econor; SLiCA; and IASOS—the Integrated Arctic Social
Observation System for Polar Year. We are also to collaborate with the Political
Economy of Northern Development. Gorm Winther is here and he will speak on that.
At the first workshop we identified categories (we call domains) for which we
would like to identify indicators. We looked at potential indicators for these
domains. Through mock testing of preliminary indicators we identify criteria and
test indicators. We also discussed the proper test for indicators. To date we
haven’t developed the procedures for the review and community consultation
process. Hopefully we will soon get some drafts out and they will need to be
reviewed and get into the consultation process. In the next 2.5 days we want to
discuss that so by the time we depart on Sunday we have an agreement on this
process.
We are working with six domains. The first three: fate control; cultural
integrity; and contact with nature were identified in the AHDR as important. At
the first ASI workshop we added the UNHDR domains: education; health/demography;
and material well-being. In Akureyri we only discussed the first three domains.
So those of us in the UNHDR domain groups have an excuse for not being as far
along. Each of these domains has team leaders, coordinators and contributors.
Indicators must be generalizeable and stable; easy to measure and broadly
accepted; suitable for use in long term analysis; fitting matrix. We have
criteria used to measure these fits. There may be additional criteria that
should be in that matrix.
• Data availability
• Measurement (ease of measurement)
• Internal validity
• Affordability
• Formal/perceived
• Robustness
• Level
• Indigenous/Non-indigenous
• Data sources
Other:
• Aggregation
• Comprehensiveness
• Coherence
• Simplicity
• Unambiguous
• Interest of stakeholders
• Generalizeable
Our timeline is that in fall 2007 (this year) we will be starting our
consultations with representatives of the arctic communities. It is important in
the next 2.5 days that we look at how we are going to do this exactly. It is
important to do that consultation because if the indicators we choose are not
reflective of the experience of those who live in the communities that we are
creating indicators for, they will not be relevant or not be used. Consultation
is critical. We will have peer review and also, now that we are endorsed by the
Arctic Council, we will have a similar process as we did with the Arctic Human
Development Report, Our progress will be posted on a password-protected area on
the AC website so the Sustainable Development Working Group can look at our work
and give us feedback. I think we only got one or two comments when we did that
with the AHDR.
Welcome and thank you for coming.
Peter Schweitzer: ASI project and work that lies ahead
Thank you, Joan. As most of you who have been involved know, it is Joan that is
leading the project and I help from time to time. My task is to tell you about
your tasks. I will try to be brief. Let me say a few basic things. First, those
of you who were present at the first workshop know that the spirit was to be
broad and wide open and bring together a heterogeneous group of people to
compromise on arctic indicators. We want to preserve that spirit while at the
same time we are feeling more time pressure to produce something. The six
domains that have been identified are really no longer under discussion. It is
not an issue. There are a number of people in the group who haven’t been part of
that discussion, but we are too far in the process to go back to last September.
The message I want to get across is that there are certain things that will be
less flexible than last fall but we want to maintain a democratic and open
spirit.
This morning we have presentations and then we move straight into break out
sessions. We must be flexible. For example, if just at lunch time we feel we
need an extra ½ hour to finish a discussion, we need to do that.
On one level at the Akureyri workshop we got farther than we thought and, at
least for the three domains discussed, we heard a number of draft indicators.
What we need to do now is to bring all six domain groups beyond the first hints
of which indicators may be possible. By Sunday each group must have a limited
number of indicators identified and have already done some kind of mock testing.
The specific product we are to deliver is the report. The report will look
similar to the AHDR in format and maybe length. It will not be printed
immediately, but it will be presented at ICAS VI, and then eventually printed
and bound. Each domain group needs to produce a chapter of 20-25 pages. As
indicated in one of Joan’s slides, deadline dates and procedures will be
discussed as we go along this weekend. Before we leave Roskilde we need to
finalize those dates and procedures for draft chapters. Then the chapters will
need to go out for review and be discussed: peer review both internal and
external. The parallel process is consultation at the community level. It’s not
relevant to just send draft chapters to someone. It is essential to get in
contact with the appropriate bodies to discuss specific indicators. The
consultation process will be discussed in the next few days. We are looking for
suggestions for the most appropriate process of community consultation. We can’t
go from community to community in the next 2 years. But we also do not want to
sacrifice this component even without time or money. We need to find a
reasonable way to discuss the roll of the permanent participants in the AC.
I think that summarizes our tasks here. We need to move the indicators forward
to a new step or stage; finalize the ideas about the report chapters; establish
deadlines and procedures; and the define the consultation process which needs to
be started in September/October. I want to throw that out to discussion. We will
be coming back to them as we go along and before we go too much farther. Our
next agenda item is the introduction of participants.
Joan
I think this ends the rounds of introductions and we will get to know each other
as the day goes on. I would now like to welcome our invited speakers. We wanted
to start the day by having formal presentations to get our minds working and
thinking about indicators. We have invited some of the people who are tied to
projects we are collaborating with. That brings me to Jack.
9:15 AM Invited 10 minute presentations
Jack Kruse & Birger Poppel:
SLiCA data and relevance for ASI
Jack
My main objective is to connect the dots between SLiCA and what we’re doing here
in the next couple days. I hope this doesn’t do violence to what Joan and Peter
have said about ASI, but as I understand it, the primary objective of ASI is to
produce a small number of indicators based on existing data. Each indicator
should be available for all Arctic indigenous and non-indigenous populations.
With SLiCA, we have a good start on pan-Arctic coverage. But we have a ways to
go to reach the goal of ASI. The Survey of Living Conditions in the Arctic does
not cover all the people in the arctic. We have data from Chukotka, Inupiat in
Alaska; Inuit in Canada and Greenland. There is also a Sami component which
hasn’t been fully realized but is still in the possible range. Perhaps data to
be collected there will happen. There is a huge part of the Soviet North not
represented. And, with the exception of Greenland, this survey does not include
non-indigenous people.
A major ASI challenge is the lack of relevant existing data. For example, I’ve
been working with ties with nature. Our working group has identified three
relevant dimensions:
“Retention” – are young people involved?
“Time on the Land”
“Use” – participation, harvest
It is likely that we will need to use different existing measures of these
concepts in different countries. It is likely that there are no relevant
measures of some concepts in some countries (eg Russia!)
One thing we can use SLICA for, is to illustrate what new data could provide.
SLICA can also help with dimensions of living conditions. It can also help
define measures of material success like amount of fish and game available
locally; cost of living etc. (Click here to go to SLiCA Release.)
In the early 1980s in Alaska we tried to design a social indicators system. We
built on work done in 40 different countries and produced a set of goals and
sub-goals. It was called the Alaska Offshore Social Indicator System (AOSIS).
You can view the spreadsheet of indicators we designed at that time which I have
organized under the six ASI domains. (Click here to go to spreadsheet) There may
be pertinent ideas and how those bridge to SLICA. These things on the thumb
intended just as tools for the working groups. We have to recognize that SLiCA
cannot be the core source for information for indicators because it misses the
non-indigenous population of the arctic.
Igor
Does SLiCA exist in a printable format? I know the electronic link. I’d
appreciate a hard copy to refer to.
Tatiana
I am sure SLiCA has developed the most comprehensive tool of social observations
and I don’t know a better one which exists. Is it possible to spread this tool
technique to other regions in the Russian North or elsewhere? How much time does
it take and is it expensive?
Jack
This is a discussion that still needs to take place. I hope in our ASI report we
will include, in our six domains, examples of indicators we would like to have
for all regions and all peoples, that could be obtained, maybe using SLiCA
measures as examples and then how ASI might evolve in the future. A component
might be, if we could collect a limited number of indicators over time, what
would those be; how much would it cost to do it; and we could use SLiCA as an
example of how much it would cost.
Birger
That would be especially important if we went to statistics or data that might
be produced in different places. But if we are going to the level of individual
well being, we will have to go out each year or two and ask all people in all
regions the same questions. If we just want to have information of something
that is quantifiable, it’s one thing. But if we want to learn about people’s
perceptions about the situation, we have to go out and ask.
Peter S.
If there are no more questions, thank you Jack. I am sure we will return to
SLiCA more in the next few days. I have a copy of the printed version. This is a
great resource for our six domains. It was great of you to organize it along
these six domains so that we can use it here. With that I would like to invite
our next speaker.
Gunn-Britt Retter:
ASI Presentation
Thank you. My name is Gunn-Britt Retter, and my home is in Sápmi, in north-east
of Norway on 70 degrees north.
I’m invited here through my position in the Saami Council, a Permanent
Participant to the Arctic Council. But I’m also a Saami politician, a member of
the Saami Parliament in Norway. As a politician, I actually have no clue of what
I’m talking about in the Parliament! All the decisions we take are based on
assumptions. Assumptions about the situation of our children; assumptions about
our language; assumptions about our livelihoods, health and so on. We simply
don’t know our society. This is a huge challenge.
In the case of the Nordic countries, with which I am most familiar, the basic
statistics and demographical data are based on the majority population. The
efforts in developing Saami-specific statistics are left to the question about
who is a Saami! We simply don’t know who the Saami people are or how to count
us! Not only has it been nearly 40 years since we were asked about that in a
census, but the most useful register we have, the electoral register for the
elections to the Saami Parliament, is not open for statistical use. There is no
individual data on which to base the development of Saami statistics. The most
exact attempt is then to use geographical statistics, including both the Saami
and non-Saami population in areas we think to have a great percentage of Saami
population. As far as I know there is no region-specific data available for
sub-Arctic Norway.
The Saami Council’s expectations of the Arctic Social Indicators Project are
that it is an academic exercise looking into the various domains to provide a
better picture of the arctic as a region in its diverse cultures. I think full
participation of indigenous academic institutions is the most viable way to
involve the indigenous people of the arctic in the project. So I am pleased to
see the high level of indigenous academic participation at this workshop.
Another discussion is, of course, whether the various indigenous peoples in the
Arctic have their academic institutions or have the capacity among their own
researchers. As ASI is now an Arctic Council project, as permanent participants,
indigenous peoples will also be part of the review process in the Arctic
Council.
Concerning the domains identified, I see the ASI project as a quest to examine
the trends identified by the 2004 AHDR, that later were identified as three of
the domains of this project; fate control; ties to nature and cultural
continuity are veyt relevant to the Saami. Also, I see the necessity in
investigating more about life expectancy, GDP per capita and health and
education – with indigenous glasses so to speak.
I think all the domains defined will lead to discussion about the well-being of
both the indigenous and non-indigenous populations of the Arctic. Then this is
becoming an amusing exercise. I would be curious about
• if we can compare the arctic with other regions of the world;
• if we can compare the life in the arctic with countries;
• if we can compare the sub-arctic part of Norway with the rest of Norway;
• if we will learn why people still live in the arctic; and
• if we will learn why people choose to come to the arctic; and
• if we will learn why people stay in the arctic.
This leads me to the question that I think will not be answered through the
selected domains – or maybe a question that answers all of them – at least it is
something I would like to know. It is concerning “belongingness” -- What does it
mean for a people to belong to a place; belong to the land and to have a home.
Most of the arctic has been colonized, and the colonizing is still going on,
both in practice, meaning among other things, the management and resource
exploitation, and not least the colonizing is still in peoples’ minds. What does
that really mean? People from outside the arctic arrived in the arctic for a
reason – often motivated by resource exploitation. In other words, resource
exploitation or even research, motivate people to move into the arctic, leaving
the place they belong to behind. So, there are people living in the arctic who
believe their home is somewhere else - outside the arctic. There are also people
who know their home is in the arctic and no where else.
So the question is does the concept of belonging to somewhere, in or outside the
arctic, mean anything for the way the arctic regions are managed, researched and
exploited. I can assure you that the exploitation potential – the Klondike
spirit, if you like -- is still present in the arctic. Do the differences in
belongingness mean anything for the people who belong in the arctic, that we
will stay in our homes after the oil and gas and other resources are gone. Do we
think differently about the management of them then? Do we feel a different kind
of responsibility maybe?
Bringing us back to the indicators work, so far the statistical data and
indicators are developed based on needs outside of the arctic. Often we see that
Saami municipalities score low on statistics, with a high level of unemployment
for instance. Is it as bad as it looks? To turn it upside down, can, in fact,
the number of individuals in social programs tell us how many still live on a
subsistence economy?
I look at ASI as an academic exercise where indigenous academic institutions and
researchers have to participate. The domains will investigate in depth various
sides of the well-being also of the indigenous people of the arctic. We won’t
get all the answers from this project, but it will be yet another step forward,
to enable us to make the best decisions for our people based on knowledge. I’d
like to finish here with a poem by Nils Aslak Valkeapaa, Ailohas:
The land
is different
when you have lived there
wandered
sweated
frozen
seen the sun
set rise
disappear return
the land is different
when you know
here are
roots
ancestors.
From Nils-Aslak Valkeapaa, The Sun, my Father, DAT, Guovdageaidnu 1997.
Matt
I’m wondering; this varies from one region to another around the arctic. You
mention the Klondike as an example of people who came and used the resource and
left. Not everyone left. Their children are increasingly still there. Young
people who are not indigenous are still in the north. How do you integrate these
people and their desire for fate control with the indigenous population?
Gunn-Britt
We were discussing just exactly that. I think the motivation for those who have
moved and have children born there create more motivations for staying – they
might have a concept of home and may have a concept of home away from there – if
you are born there you may want to stay there. You may have hard stories about
another place because your ancestors came from somewhere else. The
non-indigenous stories are more matched to the settlers. It is a question you
have to deal with as researchers. There is something to belonging somewhere. The
belongingness is a good word. If that kind of colors your management of the area
– the issue that you belong there. I think the poem pictures it nicely. That’s
also a discussion that needs to be taken.
Peter S
Your notion of belonging is helpful because it goes beyond a genetic definition
and allows us to accommodate a variety of dimensions. You might belong in the
north or have multiple dimensions or motivations.
Tatiana Vlasova:
Integrated Arctic Social Observation System: main directions of
the work and possible cooperation with ASI:
I will start with some history – in April 2006 I was invited by the chair of the
Arctic Council Sustainable Development Working Group to participate in a special
ad-hoc team to consider indicators as recommended by the AHDR. The membership of
this ad-hoc team (Indicators Team) includes such representatives as: Iceland-
Ragnar Baldursson (AHDI); the USA- Karen Perdue (Health-AHHI- IPY) ;
Russia-Tatiana Vlassova (IASOS-CASEAS); Sweden- Annika Lofgren (National
Strategy) ; Norway-Mads Greaker (ECONOR), Denmark (Birger Poppel-SLICA), Canada
(Gerald Duhaime- ARCTICSTAT) and Permanent Participants (Saami Council, RAIPON,
Arctic Athabaskan Council )
In the protocol of the AC SDWG meeting it is written that the Indicators Team
welcomes and approves follow-up on the Arctic Human Development Report (AHDR)
through the development of the Arctic Human Development Indicators (AHDI), for
which Iceland has taken the lead and through the Integrated Arctic Social
Observation System (IASOS) which is linked to the AHDI as a parallel component.
Integration of results from other projects such as SLICA, ARCTICSTAT and ECONOR
is important, as inclusion of the perspectives of both indigenous peoples and
other Arctic residents. The IASOS project proposal was discussed during this AC
SDWG meeting, as a parallel component.
What is IASOS and its role in the Scientific Program of Russian Participation in
the IPY (SPRP). As it is written in SPRP “The development of the IASOS which is
connected with CASEAS IPY EoI 899 should be specially emphasized. IASOS is one
of the socially oriented direction of the monitoring system, envisioned to be
constructed during the IPY” (p.77). Within the list of RESULTS of the Russian
scientific program “the development of tools and methods of socially-oriented
monitoring” is put on one of the first places in this Scientific Program.
IASOS -CASEAS is a Russian National and international proposal for IPY tightly
collaborating with multinational project groups of IASC, IGU, programmes of the
Arctic Council and several research and educational institutes engaged in
multidisciplinary issues of achieving social sustainability in the Arctic
region. It is becoming more and more evident that it is necessary to achieve a
larger level of Arctic societal-nature systems’ sustainability and ways of
adequate response to contemporary changes in climate and biodiversity, as well
as social and economic risks. CASEAS will be carried out from the main objective
of achieving social sustainability, meaning higher quality of life (health,
education, welfare, good governance and fate control) which is impossible
without achieving a better state of the environment (ecology).
Special attention is paid to the Russian Arctic in this proposed activity. This
region, covering almost half of the Arctic territory with diverse biophysical
features of its environment and being in the process of social transformation,
offers unique research challenges and opportunities. Moreover, the Russian
Arctic in comparison with most other parts of the circumpolar region is highly
populated and has started to be intensively developed for oil and gas, timber
exploitation, and tourism. It is experiencing severe stresses on its ecosystems,
climate and biodiversity. The IASOS-CASEAS is based on the integration of
multidisciplinary science, with the local/indigenous knowledge and assessments
of Arctic residents. Traditional knowledge, observations and perceptions of the
Arctic residents will be balanced with the interpretations of scientists and
decision-makers.
What I’d like to stress – is that this proposal is connected with PPS Arctic
(IPY #151 --Present day Processes, past changes and spatio-temporal variability
of biotic, abiotic and socio-environmental conditions and resource components),
ELOKA (IPY #187 – The Exchange of Local Observations – World Centre of
Glaciology (Boulder, USA)), and COMAAR (Eol-503) – Coordination of Observation
and Monitoring of the Arctic for Assessment and Research. Comaar did not receive
money. We were also invited to other IPY projects (Arctic Resilience – Inuit
Circumpolar Conference, etc.).
We were invited to participate in the International Council for Science (ICSU)
to identify new directions of social monitoring – social observations. We don’t
have tools but we are discussing these tools, indicators and methods. This is
important. The two main objectives of IASOS are to develop “tools and methods of
socially-oriented monitoring” and the installation of the international Centre
for Arctic Socially-oriented Monitoring (CASM) to gather, manage and distribute
the data.
This term “socially-oriented” monitoring may not translate well in English.
Generally socially-oriented monitoring is the observation of specially
identified key challenges (limits to quality of life) and human-defined targets
set to achieve better quality of life and sustainability. Socially-oriented
indicators should be identified in order to monitor and control changes in the
way to a better (or worse) quality of life and sustainability. The main
objective of socially-oriented observations and monitoring is to increase
knowledge of socio-economic, political and living conditions of northern
residents under the impacts of happening environmental (climate, biodiversity,
pollution), socio-economic and political changes in order to raise adaptive and
mitigation capabilities of people for achieving a better quality of life.
Then I would like to talk about why socially oriented indicators are needed.
They are needed, as it is written in the AHDR, “to deepen the relationships
between economic development and human development in the Arctic, rather than to
assume that what is good for companies is good for societies” (AHDR). They are
needed for policy makers to make wise decisions. In the draft of the Social
Doctrine of the Russian Federation which we discussed at the Socio-ecological
Congress in 2007, in Komi Republic, socially-oriented monitoring is considered
to be an important tool not only for improving socio-economic situation in the
Russian North, but to bring broad social groups of people into the discussion of
possible ways of achieving sustainability. The development of a set of key
social indicators vitally important for people is one of the goals of the Social
Doctrine of the Russian Federation.
We need to understand and discuss the variance between how indicators may mean
one thing in one place/person/region and another in another place/person/region.
We have to think at which levels we should use which levels of scales. We have
to include all arctic residents in our research – not just indigenous residents
of the arctic regions. As Peter Schweitzer said, “Successful social science
(observations) can only be conducted in concert with the people it concerns”
(P.Schweitzer), with the input of all stakeholders, especially at the local or
regional scale. The challenge is that there is not a specific set of indicators
that are meaningful for all groups of arctic residents. Local and traditional
knowledge (LTK) provides mostly qualitative data, not quantitative, as
statistical method and approaches. The target is the search for innovative tools
of management of such an important and valuable data based on LTK observations.
(For more details go to power point presentation, beginning with slide 17).
Solveig Glomsrød:
ECONOR (Follow-up of the ECONOR project Presentation
prepared for the SDWG meeting in Tromsø, April 2007: Research department,
Statistics Norway)
The Economy of the North II – It’s a joint project of representatives of
statistical bureaus in the arctic regions and some academics. The primary target
of part 1 and 2 is to establish a set of consistent economic data for the arctic
regions. I shall not spend much time on the results. We produced the report I
can send you if you want a paper copy. It is available on the home page of
Statistics Norway. I will talk about our final processes in the next couple
years.
The main contents of the ECONOR 1 report was focused on production: GDP per
capita by region; economy by region and consistent level of aggregation and a
chapter on the economic activity of the Saami condition and villages. It was
all, of course, too narrow – what was missing was the information that was more
directly telling us about the economic standard of living and – that is the main
focus of Econor 2: to add more statistics and make it more relevant for standard
of living in the arctic.
The other main issue is to calculate the economic value of key natural
resources. We have in the report a chapter about the amount of resources in the
arctic ranging from petroleum resources to fish and forests. The intention now
is to go further and assess this in terms of value. There is also an underlying
target for all the ECONOR work is to assess the impact of climate and the
consequences of climate change on indigenous people of the arctic.
We plan to look for some time series of essential issues in the economy of the
north. For example we need to look at GDP, not just for a single year, but to go
on and update it and indicate development. We will also look in the time series
for the structure of development by sectors and, as in the first report, look
for development and natural resource dependency. We will add data on standards
of living. I don’t know how far we can come in doing that. We will at least
decompose GPD into compensation to labor and capital (and possibly resource
rents) and add data on disposable income including transfers.
We will look for the impact of climate change on the indigenous population. We
will establish a set of incentives structure. We think there is a lot of
information in anthropological literature and in SLiCA to give more precise
identification to incentives to indigenous populations living in the mixed
cash/subsistence economy. We also believe this will benefit policy makers. It
will be better information to see how policy measures affect the indigenous
population versus anyone who lives in an inflexible market economy.
The project group was as follows:
Gunnar Eskeland, Line Sunniva Flottorp, CICERO
Alexander Goncharov, Federal State Statistics Service, Russia
Gerard Duhaime, Andrée Caron, Université Laval, Canada
Helen McDonald, Rob Smith, Statistics Canada, Canada
Birger Poppel, Ilisimatusarfik, University of Greenland, Denmark
Marianne Eriksson, Statistics Sweden, Sweden
Scott Goldsmith, University of Alaska at Anchorage, USA
Ilmo Mäenpää, University of Oulo, Finland his was a project group.
We have not initiated phase 2. The meeting planned for September 2007 will be delayed. We plan to produce three separate reports including:
1. Update key-data, and add data relevant to the standards of living in the Arctic
2. Special study of the economic value of the main natural resources of the Arctic, including an analysis of effects of climate change
3. Special study of climate change and indigenous peoples’ life situation
We are also applying for more funding and hope to include Birger and Jack in this next phase. We look forward to going on with Phase 2.
Larry H
What is the scale of time series you mentioned? Is there one for north Norway?
Solveig
The first was 1 year.
Larry H
It’s the GDP of Norway?
Solveig
We have used the dimension of line – except your contribution – I don’t know
what we can do with the degree of desegregation – at the outside it is intended
to cover the line – we want to make some progress on that.
Andrey
You still don’t know what level you are aiming – is it regional levels? What is
your goal, what is feasible?
Solveig
These nine regions are: I didn’t show this map in the slide show – I can
distribute these to anyone who wants – it’s available on the internet.
Puju
Since you’re studying the different economies – are you expecting to have
recommendations for policy as to subsistence and mixed economy situations?
Solveig
If we think we have something to say about the incentives governing people
operating in a mixed economy market/subsistence economy we will do that. It is
important to send drafts to people in this group and get input – we are
newcomers to this context. One more issue – I think it could be useful – there
is an active UN initiative working on sustainable indicators. (Name?) from Stat
Can is about to conclude several years’ work for the United Nations which took a
great deal of sorts of funds sunk into the process of establishing indicators.
We should probably be in contact with them.
Joan
Thank you to the speakers. We are trying to establish a loud speaker system. We
are behind a little bit but that’s to be expected. So that’s no surprise. We
would like to catch up as much as possible so now we are entering into the
second important part. Each of the domain groups get a chance to do a small
report on the status of their work or where they are at. So, we did suggest 10
minutes for presentations, but since we’re running late, if each group could
stay between 5 and a max of 10 minutes – either limit or have no questions so we
can get into domain groups as fast as possible. We are going to invite team
leaders of each of the domains – there will be several opportunities to report
in the next coupled days. It might be good if you could report from up here and
use the loud speaker. First is Fate Control with Jens Dahl and Gail Fondahl.
10:30 AM 10 minute presentation/updates by team leaders, and brief discussion:
Fate Control (Gail Fondahl)
In Akureyri we developed 14 potential indicator areas and then put them in
groups: political activism; decision making power; economic control; knowledge
construction. So we developed a framework for thinking about how tractable these
are. Over the last few months we’ve tried to discuss these but haven’t been very
successful. Email has not been very constructive. I heard a good paper from
Andrey a couple months ago and thought he’d be good for this group. I had some
discussions with Alex Micholas, which merely emphasized the importance of these
face-to-face meetings. Here we make leaps of progress and other means of
contacts lead to slower progress.
Some discussions implicitly ferret out that some of the indicators won’t work in
the sense of being relevant to policy, tractable, or affordable. I think that’s
all.
Cultural Viability (Peter Schweitzer)
To briefly update: We haven’t made much progress either. We had a small group in
September with 4 members; Larry K; Rasmus; Stephanie and myself. We lost Rasmus
to another domain because when we discussed cultural integrity in September, we
introduced education as something that needs to be discussed so Rasmus took that
over. We lost Stephanie to a baby. She will be with the project. Only two of us
here were part of this original group. But this afternoon, if you look at the
list, there will be seven people discussing issues of cultural viability – the
majority of them being new to this discussion. We feel that we probably will be
going in quite new direction, considering we have five new members in our domain
group. In September we had four different realms of indicators: language, media,
cultural events and spiritual practices. We have to see where it goes from here.
Everybody agrees that we need to do something with language; I’m not sure
whether we’ll take on spiritual practices; we’re all aware that time is running
out—this afternoon there will be a new beginning for the cultural integrity
group.
Closeness to Nature (Leslie King)
We’re extremely top heavy in leadership structure. This domain gives us the
opportunity to develop unique indicators. One of our first issues was the name.
We’ve called it “closeness to nature”; “close and meaningful relation to natural
world”, “longing for the land”, “belonging”. What I’d like to do, is to have
each of us say a few words. Susie, Bruce, Jack and I are team leaders. We
welcome our new members. Larry you are still going to have to liaison.
We have had a lot of problems defining the issue – is reindeer herding close to
nature? Is resource development close to nature? Defining it has been a
challenge. We kept going back to the AHDR and looking for guidance on our task
in terms of follow-up to the AHDR. We face the same challenges and problems
faced by all the groups.
One of the things I’d like to talk about at this meeting is the relationship to
other indicators. It would be nice if we didn’t overlap our indicators, but
connected meaningful indicators, measurable across the arctic. We think this
will be a large challenge. The concept may be similar but data availability is a
problem. We’d like the ability to track indicators over time. And it is
important to be developing these indicators as tools for communities.
Our three concept areas of potential indicators are:
• participation in traditional activities ( harvest, consumption)
• time on the land; and finally one that I’m increasingly fond of
• youth retention, education (existence and extent of place-based education.
This is our real challenge: how do we track the change in the relationship of arctic residents to the land over time?
Susie Crate
I’ll talk about the process. In Akureyri we thought it would be easy to generate
3 or 4 indicators. We got 23. When we put them into the matrix it caused us to
cancel out a lot of them because of problems. They included harvest,
consumption, local control over resources; resource dependence. We came up with
about 3 we really liked and 2 more. Over the last 8 months we have had
conference calls and discussed at length how we are going to find data for all
these. SLiCA won’t solve all our problems. The whole issue of finding data that
can answer questions about native and non-native is tough.
Bruce Forbes
We had trouble defining “closeness with nature”. Somehow, “closeness with
nature” implies somehow that people are apart from nature. The people I work
with see themselves as part of nature and therefore can’t “get close” to nature.
We have difficulty identifying this across the arctic. Reindeer herding and
harvest in North America don’t address some of this. Youth retention came in at
the very end of Tatiana’s presentation. It’s strong here and in Finno-Scandia.
People are aware of whether young people are retained – whether they stay in the
north. I call it warm bodies in the north. We have found that it’s not just ties
to nature. I hope that we can come back to this and help people with this
concept of contact with nature.
Jack Kruse
I think that our group, like the other groups, needs to make the transition to
getting to Yes. We spent a lot of time saying “it doesn’t work that way in my
country.” Each of us found that these three concepts could fit, somehow, in my
country or my area. Whether or not kids are involved fits in Barrow and in
Kautokeno. We thought we would each try to tell the story through those three
concepts and compare notes. To see how close we could get to see that they were
a measure of the same concept. Let’s start at least at the step where we are
describing the concept.
Gunn-Britt
Peter mentioned spiritual practices. Might that better belong to closeness to
nature?
Peter S
We can have a subcommittee to that – several of these things are overlapping –
it may land as a technical issue. It’s a good point that applies to a variety of
indicators.
Material Well-Being: (Joan Nymand Larsen)
I am presenting on behalf of the material well being domain. We were not part of
the 1st workshop so we are excused for not being very far along. We have
compared some ideas by email. Lee Huskey, Matt Berman, Gorm Winther (Political
Economy, IPY 227), Jack Kruse (SLiCA), Solveig Glomsrød (ECONOR) and Gerard
Duhaime (Arctic Stat). We will be collaborating with several projects including:
ArcticStat; Political Economy of Northern Development; IASOS, ECONOR and SLiCA.
So far we have just done some brainstorming: at a macro level we’re talking
about:
• GDP;
• GDP per capita;
• GDP adjusted for subsistence;
• GDP in the north as a percent of the nation;
• GDP per capita in the north as percent of the nation
• Income distribution
• Poverty indicator
Arctic Stat is already created. We talked about labour market indicators as
indicators of well being in the north; the same indicators we always hear about.
We may discuss those to see if there’s anything there for us. We talked about
income data: we may channel into some of the SLiCA data to see how powerful that
data might be. We discussed resources of the wealth; resources retained in the
Arctic; ownership of the industry; profits of the resources. What are the net
resource flows?
Other macro ideas include: economic instability index; economic diversification
index; trade concentration index; and dependency indicators. These indicators
are closely tied to GDP and well-being. We need to determine to what extent
we’re talking to the macro level and to what extent to the micro level of data.
Political Economy of Northern Development (PEND) project is collaborating with
us in ASI. Some early ideas on what we might find with PEND is productivity
data. We have thought about looking at the degree of economic dependence; the
distribution of private/government investments and consumption; the cyclical
fluctuations of employment, inflation and unemployment figures; types of
ownership; distribution of income and poverty and data on subsistence
activities.
These are just brainstorming ideas that Gorm came up with and they will form the
background for our initial work today as we get started. Jack also made the
point that the OECD approach idea to wellbeing is to look at income, employment,
housing, food, personal goods and services and satisfactory physical
environment. Here we get more into the micro level. It is important to look what
level we’re operating in. We have SLiCA and our material success domain is
linked to a group of SLICA indicators. The SLiCA team did make some regressions
examining the relative relationship of materials success variables. Four major
clusters: basic necessities of material success; objective indicators of
production, income and well-being; satisfaction with community infrastructure
components (e.g. education, environmental quality); and satisfaction with life
overall.
We are going to be looking at what SLICA has been doing, keeping in mind SLiCA
is on indigenous people and our work here in this project must consider all
inhabitants of the arctic. The top explanatory variables within the SLICA that
work to determine life satisfaction are:
Satisfaction with amount of fish and game available locally.
Satisfaction with standard of living.
Satisfaction with transportation.
Satisfaction with combination of production activities.
Satisfaction with recreation facilities.
There is a lot of micro work there. We will be working with that and see what we
can draw from that, keeping in mind that we hope to come to one indicator in the
end for our domain. One indicator can’t get all of this. It’s alot of work to
sort through this and see what indicator is the most critical.
One of the SLICA regressions is per capita household income and total personal
income. These are indicators we know and use at a macro level. It may be that in
the end we use the standard GDP indicators. Other issues/indicators we’ve
considered are a dependency index: to indicate a region’s economic dependence on
external decisions; and calculation of a similar index for resource
revenue-taxes and royalties to higher levels of government. If we look at
subsistence there is that question of the accuracy of data. Lee Huskey and
others in this room are doing work on migration, that maybe an indictor to look
at.
There are various possible testing criteria for testing the usefulness of these
potential indicators that we identify. This afternoon we will have to start to
define what we mean by material well being. We will start by having that
discussion on our definition. Then we’ll look at criteria for selection which is
a list I sent you all by email.
Possible criteria for testing:
• Data availability
• Measurement (ease of measurement)
• Internal validity
• Affordability
• Formal/perceived
• Robustness
• Level
• Indigenous/non-indigenous
• Data sources
• Other:
• Aggregation
• Comprehensiveness
• Coherence
• Simplicity
• Unambiguous
• Interest of stakeholders
• Generalizeable
Gail
I think I can see potential overlap with fate control – it would be helpful to
look at the overlaps and not- re-invent wheels.
Joan
I was going to suggest that fate control and material success meet to discuss
possible overlaps. This afternoon let’s talk about overlaps.
Education (Rasmus Ole Rasmussen and Ray Barnhardt)
Education: I’ll start. The education group is a group that was established after
the Iceland workshop, so we have had limited opportunities to meet and discuss.
This is the first real opportunity to meet and discuss, though we have exchanged
some ideas, especially the complexity of the problems. This is by no means a
complete list of what we have talked about:
• education for whom;
• education to what;
• education how;
• measures of input;
• outcome processes; and
• involvement.
I think we are going to have interesting discussions in this connection. We are three in the group. If there are others in this group who might like to join our discussions we would be happy to include others. I think we will cover some of the ground but by no means all the ground in this connection.
Igor
This group needs volunteers. There are just two of you, but you need other
ideas. You should have at least 3-4 people in your discussion.
Rasmus
We have several potential people in this room.
Joan
With all the newcomers we tried to fit them in different domains. We welcome the
newcomers to go wherever you want.
Ray
I’d like to reinforce the importance of communication across groups. Education
is very important and cross-cutting; maybe each group could identify a person
from their group to link to the education group.
Peter S
Let’s move on to health and demography:
Demographic and Health Indicators (Larry Hamilton)
We were also a group formed after the Akureyri meeting, but have only exchanged
some emails. As I listened to the talks today, I heard a wide variety of
references to scale. Some people are talking about indicators for Norway; others
are talking about local communities or individuals. You have to choose the scale
of analysis. I think people are interested in different things here. I’m
interested in meso-scale indicators – pan arctic 900 social units covering the
entire Arctic Ocean basin. I’m trying to figure out what indicators you can get
for 900 units.
To be useful, indicators should be generalizeable and stable; easy to measure in
a broadly accepted manner, and measurable over time. It would be the most
valuable if it has been measured in the past for quite a few years.
We need to determine scale. Arctic Social Indicators will be more useful if they
describe social units smaller than whole nations or states. That is, smaller
than Finland or Alaska. One number for Iceland would be dominated by Reykjavik.
I don’t think we have the resources to get GDP. You can get annual populations
at smaller levels. You can derive direction, growth rate; history of change.
This slide (slide 6) shows population growth curves for 1969-2003. You can do
this sort of thing and it gives you several quantifications of where population
is changing and where it is headed. Age/sex population; sex-ratio is an
interesting indicator in arctic populations. You can’t get life expectancy. But
populations over 65 is a correlator. One of the best forecasts we have for
social science is that the people here today will be a year older next year.
We’re stepping up to a larger scale here. What can you really compare over large
regions? If I just color each nation, oblast or county, (sub-national regions)
there are more interesting things you can do with that. The colors you see here
show that this is the pan-arctic (the physical region that drains in to the
Arctic Ocean).
These slides show an aging population due to out-migration of young people.
Annual births and deaths; derived indicators see slide.
You can do graphical displays – population change; net migration; where the line
goes up it shows immigration; where the line comes down it shows net
out-migration; relatively little change in migration in Selawik but birthrate
differs. Population change can be indicators of economic conditions. Areas where
fishing and mining are principle occupations of the workforce tend to be losing
population. Places that are growing tend to have a younger population; places
that are shrinking tend to have an older population. It tells us who’s going and
who’s staying. I started out with more ambitious indicators. These are things
that exist.
Andrey
This data exists?
Larry H
There is a lot of work to do to go from Statistics Canada data or other data and
make them look alike. In Alaska we’re using census equivalent entities. In
Canada it’s census subdivisions.
Bruce
I’m glad you raised the scale issue and showed that slide with communities that
are different. In Russia there are neighboring brigades that migrate a couple
kilometres apart but have very different issues.
Larry H
The variables are constrained in what you choose for analysis.
Matt
This applies to all groups. It seems there is a trade-off between getting the
measures you like from the ones that are available. You start with the three
indicators of the AHDR. If we really wanted to be consistent with the UN we
could stick with the UN – there’s a trade off with collecting indicators for the
arctic that are not available.
I think it would not be that difficult to do based on the model. The question
is, is it because the established indicators are the wrong ones for the arctic
or are they not available?
Larry H
To do the GDP for Greenland by each community.
Matt
Is it just not feasible to generate these numbers at the scales that are
relevant?
Peter S
Clearly, as you heard this morning, the development in the last workshop was
that we started out only with the three domains that came out from the AHDR.
However, we then went back and added the 3 UN domains. It is an ongoing debate
what these groups will come up with. The door is open to say, “yes, GDP is the
best measure.” There is no final decision reached in any of these groups.
Birger
The reason we discussed this in depth is that we didn’t think that the
traditional indicators necessarily described that much about well being for all
arctic citizens.
Peter S
Some people said so, but some said perhaps not.
Joan
We have to find some way of including the value of subsistence in the arctic. If
we can do that we can continue to use it in the arctic.
Tatiana
I am interested in these slides about aging populations in Russia. I have
different statistics. In my mind there is a tendency of aging of population in
the north to be due to the out-migration of youth from the north. In previous
decades the population of the Russian north was younger than the south; you show
that it’s declining in Russia.
Larry H
Places that are growing fast are younger; places declining in population tend to
be older people.
Tatiana
Sixty-five years is not our limited statistical age. we have to learn to compare
65 and 75. In Russia there will be some problems with that 65 and 75.
I think it will be valuable to point to the relationships between the all the
domains. We may want to try that.
Rune
I wanted to inform you this is the first occasion we have to market some of the
documentaries we at the Indigenous Peoples Secretariat have made on the cultural
issues of indigenous peoples of the arctic. This is a documentary on the
conflict between reindeer herding and foresting in Northern Finland. This
documentary is intended to be used for educational purposes. Use it at your
universities as educational material. If there are not enough copies, let me
know, and I’ll send you one.
Brief Plenary Continues after lunch:
Joan
I thought it would be good if we met here to be sure you’re not lost on campus –
maybe some of you will end up outside in the sun. For the rest of the afternoon
except for a 45 minute final plenary session, we are to be in the domain groups.
All the newcomers to this project have a license to change from the domain they
have preliminarily been placed in. If you want to change domains, feel free to
do so. You are not stuck. Somebody suggested before the break that if there are
groups that feel they would benefit from getting together, such as fate control
and material well-being, get as much out of the afternoon as possible. It will
be the team leader’s responsibility to bring newcomers up to speed.
Basically continue the work begun in Akureyri and new groups need to start back
at the brainstorming. Keep in mind the consultation and review process and time
lines. Before we depart on Sunday we want to be in agreement on the consultation
and review process and the due dates for the first drafts and who will be doing
what. We will talk tomorrow sometime about the final report and how we perceive
layout. Peter and I are scheming about the possibility of finding funding for a
small group meeting, in February. This meeting would be for one representative
of each domain group and me and Peter to make sure we are all on the same page
and discuss cross-cutting issues. It will be dependent on funding and
practicality.
Peter S
We had interesting discussions before lunch about scale. I would like to remind
everyone that we are dealing with two different kinds of products: one is this
limited list of indicators that we will come up with at the end. But that’s not
the whole story. There are six chapters and these chapters give us room to think
about what we really want and the limitations and across scales. There’s a lot
of room, even in 25 pages per chapter, to go in a variety of directions. I think
the chapters should justify why we came up with the limited list but they can
also be used to put a lot of thought into what is best.
Joan
We are thinking the chapters will include a lot about our brainstorming exercise
to list our ideas and the reasons for the indicators we come up with for each
domain. At the end of the report we will pull an indicator from each domain to
be the critical little set people can use for monitoring development. If someone
is only interested in fate control, they can go to that chapter and read about
the ideas discussed. Our ideas can be part of the chapter.
Larry H
About content of the chapters – what about the next step of producing an
indicator with numbers? Until you go to the actual step of trying to do it, you
don’t know what you’re talking about.
Joan
In the final chapter where we have a small set of indicators, we might actually
put numbers with those we recommend.
Jack
That’s a story that can be told with numbers. We may not have the same series
between countries, but we can say “this is what we’d like to have” and then tell
the story with what we can get now in the various countries. But that’s part of
the story of why we came up with the final set we come to.
Joan
Arguing that we don’t have data for some of the indicators that may sound
perfect is okay.
Igor
I may be putting the cart before the horse, but I have a feeling that going down
to three indicators is a complete capitulation under the pressure of our
sponsors. I cannot imagine that is a simple a solution. Three indicators cannot
give the policymakers what they need. We have to have a minimum of six
indicators. We have to stick with six to be fair. This is our minimal number. We
shouldn’t go below the number of groups we have.
Peter S
At this point every group is charged with finding more than one indicator for
their domain. Three is a number that has been floating around or limited to 1-3
for each domain. That decision should be argued in the chapter for the domain.
What Joan brought up is merely a pure possibility that it might be fair. It
would be ideal that in the final chapter you have six indicators. It might not
work out that we end up with exactly six indicators. There are certain
indicators that have limited regional value. Let’s see where we get, and if it
appears we come up with fewer than six indicators – it is probably not a
fairness argument.
Birger
It’s a reasonable argument. A basic argument was we couldn’t say, in fairness,
that we could come up with less than one indicator for each of these areas.
Yvon
Sorry to come back to basics. I was involved in the AHDR but I missed the
Akureyri meeting. Ultimately what are we measuring? Aren’t we measuring the
arctic social indicators as advocated in the Arctic Human Development Report?
Now we are measuring cultural viability – the main thing is human development?
Joan
Well being or quality of life . . . . we use the word, the general term human
development. It is well being.
Yvon
I am not asking to give us all a hard time but because of the process we used
and the fact they come out of the human development report. At the same time the
process was inductive. We haven’t tried to see if they stand the test and it
looks like we arrived there by consensus because Nils and Oran summed up with
things people wouldn’t fight about, so you have the three that came from the UN
and those recommended by the AHDR.
Peter S
We are not testing the domains. How we arrived there can be criticised, but we
are there. We could go back and say let’s create three or 15 domains instead of
these six, but we don’t feel we have the time to do that.
Yvon
That means we think we know what’s important in the human development in the
arctic. We don’t ever ask the question if we find out there are actually other
relevant dimensions.
Peter S
You mean that are not covered by these domains?
Yvon
In between or overlapping . . .
Peter S
If we feel individually or as a group that there are things that are not covered
somehow by these domains, we should look at that, that shouldn’t be the case.
Joan
The SLiCA data is now divided into these six domains. The way I see it, it would
be hard to imagine an indicator that wouldn’t fit into one of these six domains.
Peter S
If you feel there are areas that are not being covered, we need to see if they
can be covered within these domains – it would be inappropriate to leave
something out.
Birger
I think it’s fair to say at the least to those who didn’t participate – we
inherited the first three domains from the AHDR, and many of us felt that if
they were meant to cover all populations in the arctic, there should be more
domains. So we decided to add more, and we added the human development
indicators used by the UN. I guess to say otherwise would be disrupting the
past. We deliberately fit the SLiCA data into this format because these domains
were decided on at the last meeting. It was not a rationale on its own.
Matt
I’m new to this process. I don’t know how much you’ve paid attention to the UN
HD work rather than – the AHDR –
Birger
What I just said is we included them.
Matt
The UN effort has these three indicators that they’ve tracked over time. Every
year they describe more domains than that and they talk about them more over
time. To some extent we are arguing about things we don’t need to argue about.
The UN’s example is different. . . . they have more subtle indicators.
Peter S
This is a good point to remind everyone to this discussion about how many will
be listed in the executive summary. If it’s six or fewer or more, there will be
a number of indicators from each domain that will be discussed, quantified and
indicated from each domain. It could even be eight indicators in the end.
Jens
We, in the fate control group, are operating with 14 indicators. We may end up
with only 1-3 but in the chapter we will discuss all 14 and describe why these
(one to three) are chosen. Do we know what well being is and do we know what
human development is? In the UN no one has been able to define “indigenous
people.” Let’s not be disturbed by the small percentage of us who may be unsure.
The majority of us know what we believe human development is. Let’s not disagree
on that – it’s a huge discussion.
Jack
Referring back to scale – on the same thumb that Marg will have, is an excel
file that Larry was using to describe a mid-level scale some of us will use for
measurement. If you have another idea, let us know. I agree with Larry, we need
to be concrete to have a thematic unit of analysis that we are reaching for.
Solveig
I missed the discussion of what the ruling principles of choosing indicators
should be – one trend is to define the different kind of capital: wealth,
including natural wealth and institutional capital and choose indicators that
point to these wealth elements. I feel there may be other principles in the
debate. One definition of sustainability is “to develop without running down
(depleting) total wealth.” I wonder if there are other principles in the
discussion you have held to choose indicators.
Joan
In the fate control group we listed a set of 8-12 criteria we were using for
choosing indicators. I believe those were pretty much the same criteria other
groups were using. Those in the Akureyri meeting will be able to pass along
those criteria to them. I sent the list of criteria out.
Peter
There were criteria; robustness; comparability; whether it was limited to
indigenous peoples or not; etc
Solveig
We need not only to look at the criteria. But we need tools to follow the
principles. Where are the principles for doing it?
Peter S
I think Joan showed a number of principles in her presentation. Stability; is
data available; because we don’t have time to go out and create data for
interesting indicators.
Joan
That they can be collected and monitored at low cost and that they can be used
and generalized and stable. Those are basically the principles. One thing we
want to keep in mind is the cost issue. There is no point in suggesting an
indicator which has a cost that is so enormous that it would never be
implemented.
Peter S
But in the narrative we can propose that kind of activity.
Joan
We want to be able to present a small set of indicators that people will use
because they can find, or get, or collect the data without huge cost.
Yvon
That means we can learn from Slica what would be useful to know and what can be
measured. But it will not be implemented as a new survey.
Jack
I don’t concede that it would be much cheaper to do again in 5-10 years.
Joan
ASI would be annual. We hope we come up with a set of indicators that would be
handled annually in an affordable manner.
Leslie
I just wanted to say we shouldn’t treat any of these criteria as a deal breaker.
We tried to find indicators that satisfy as many of these criteria as possible.
It could well turn out with a deal breaker like cost of collecting the data –
meanwhile we have to come up with indicators that cover as many criteria as
possible.
Puju
It has been easy to – through SLiCA and the new surveys it is possible to show
both national data and the indigenous and non-indigenous data at the same time.
Leslie
That may be the deal breaker – if you can’t measure for both populations at
once, it’s not going to happen.
Peter S
Let’s break into our groups.
Break out session: Participants meet in individual domain groups. Task:
continue work on indicators (e.g. identification and discussion of indicators,
criteria, testing, consultation, problem areas, etc.).
4:45 PM Plenary: Brief reports on progress
Joan
Maybe we should get started. We are now going to wrap up today’s work with a
final reporting session – just a session to give everyone an opportunity to say
how far we’ve gotten and look at any problem areas. We thought each group could
take 5 minutes or so or whatever time you need. Dinner is at 7:30 – we don’t
want to be longer than 6 o’clock in this room. We are asking the six domain
groups to let us know where you are at and maybe what indicators you are looking
at. We thought we would start with the group that went last – health and
demography.
Health/Demographics (Larry H)
I’ll just say we made lots of progress. We’ll finish our chapter tomorrow. We
talked about what we know we can get and what we hope to get. We want to be
geographically specific to choose indicators scalable – county, village or
ethnic group level – cut several ways not narrowly defined to one unit. We
discussed specific indicators in these areas – there will be lots of contextual
discussion. We don’t all have universal definitions but may need social,
political and maybe demographic contexts before talking about them.
Peter S
My question is, have you discussed specific indicators you are willing to share?
Larry H
Yes. For example number of births; and then births to mothers under 18; number
of deaths and number of deaths by injury; population, age/sex ratio – health
care measures – from surveys health behaviour smoking/obesity; infant mortality
suicides; diseases: infectious diseases.
Peter S
How do you see prospects of coming up with 1-3 indicators by Sunday?
Larry H
We didn’t talk about how to get to 1-3 indicators.
Igor
I have a question, Larry. I was very impressed with your comment about scaling.
Did you come up with any suggestions? You alluded to this in your one paragraph
statement – what is the level of scaling you recommend? When six groups go six
tracks, it takes a lot of work to come back under one document. Maybe you have
suggestions for other groups.
Larry H
I have an answer to that. We were trying to define our variables in a way it
could apply to one village. For the State of Alaska there are 27 units – the
census equivalent entities: The North Slope Borough; Northwest Arctic Borough;
and Bristol Bay census etc. the three northern counties of Norway – in Greenland
there are five regions; eight in Iceland.
Igor
If we are to recommend using census divisions whatever that is in each country,
that is difficult to replicate without a census. A survey would imply we are not
covering a census or a sample with a census district.
Jack
What Larry’s talking about is what we did with SLiCA.
Igor
Yeah but that’s sophisticated –
Matt
Does the scale you’re reporting and the other information aggregate to the
region or does it address differences among communities? I think the former is a
good level. We don’t want to be more precise than that, but we want indicators
that may differentiate small communities from large communities.
Igor
Can you give an example of how many of those districts there are across the
Russian north – 300 or 50?
Larry H
Closer to 50 than 300 – sub-national – oblasts. I can look it up.
Bruce
It sounds like the rayons.
Tatiana
There are 60 oblasts that belong to the north or adjacent territories at the
local administrative level.
Peter s
If there are no other comments, next is Education.
Education (Rasmus)
I think we had some very productive time as it was the first time to exchange
views in person. We went around the three topics: who, what and how. In the case
of who, we discussed: education as liberty, socialization process, preparation
in relation in community viability; seeing the community in global and local
contexts and having both connections and education. We discussed the question of
cultural viability in this context and were discussing that it is not the risk
of seeing viability as in isolation and not related to things going on outside
self. I think in many ways we were, in each case, discussing which other groups
we relate to; i.e. community well being questions. We may need to meet with them
to discuss these issues.
Relation of education to what – options for decision making in connection with
education systems; to what extent the communities are able to be part of the
decision process or is education imposed on them from the outside. We talked
about ensuring gender representation in the decision-making part. And we talked
about the relationship between this issue and the fate control group work.
Education how – we looked especially into issues such as place and context. To
what extent the education system will reflect local experience and how the
education systems could reflect on taking experiences into the education system
and in this connection discussed connection to the close to nature group. I
think these discussions will continue tomorrow.
More precise indicators: students pursuing post-secondary education
opportunities. Such an indicator should reflect on what extent post-secondary
opportunity is available for both genders. Do students have these opportunities
and do they pursue these opportunities? It is one thing to offer and another to
take advantage of the opportunities. It connects well to the demographic issues
discussed before: age, gender, and ethnicity are crucial. We discussed the
experience of Alaska and Greenland with respect to gender differences.
The last thing we talked about is how many students pursue these opportunities.
Then how many finalize these opportunities. So far we have one indicator.
Bruce
Is the next step how many of those students stay in the north?
Rasmus
Yes, that’s definitely part of the picture. It’s part of both this question of
for whom and to what? What extent is education for the community? If it is for
the community, does it limit opportunities for students to go elsewhere?
Ray
I would just reinforce the point made earlier, because topics are discussed in
parallel – if one person from each of those groups might join us for a while
tomorrow, we can make sure with what we’re coming up with and what you’re coming
up is connected.
Joan
Also tomorrow your domain will be joined by Jan-Henry Keskitalo. I think that
brings us to our domain, material well being. Lee will you talk about it?
Material Well-being (Lee)
When you get enough economists together you get GDP, income, employment and the
job done. Pretty quickly we started talking about problems with those measures
in small regions of the north. Some of those measures ignore non-residents,
subsistence, cost of living, high prices for goods and services, and the public
services provided. We have this set of measures but an equal or longer set of
problems, so we talked about what we are really talking about when we talk about
well being. We’re talking about the “stuff” jobs, traditional activities, and
the prospects being able to acquire “stuff” in the future. We began to try to
wrestle with how to measure the “stuff”. Do regions have a set of necessities
for living? How would we measure the set of basic necessities? This is something
others may have discussed: Housing—measure of housing quality; food security;
health status; health care and access to education – that would be the basic
necessities component.
Access to opportunities: In terms of measures, we didn’t talk about specific
things but we recognize there are some labour market measures for indication:
Employment and unemployment. But we also have to consider opportunities for
subsistence. We didn’t talk about any specific measures. We figured someone else
would do that.
We also talked about migration as an indicator of well being, at least to look
at changes over time. We talked about the need to have an indicator that
addresses the potential for instability. Finally we talked about this
distinction between settler and indigenous communities. Can we find indicators
that are as robust in settler communities and indigenous communities, especially
when we deal with these issues at smaller regional scales? We don’t have a set
of indicators yet.
Andrey
Do you have structural issues and well being? Do you think that’s not viable?
Lee
One of the problems with the traditional economic indicators is whether they say
the same thing in a small economy as they do at a national level.
Joan
We did talk about a lot of possibilities. Lee was just trying to mention overall
possibilities. One of the considerations was poverty rates as well as a number
of other standard economic indicators.
Leslie
Did you look at a “real progress” indicator and other alternative indicators of
well being? That’s where you take GDP and subtract pollution etc.
Matt
They’re based on trying to fix GDP - -so it has the same problems as GDP.
Closeness to Nature (Leslie)
We did a number of things. We made some progress though it may not sound like
it. The first thing we did was review the nature matrix developed in Akureyri
for both our benefit and for our new members. Then we looked at the criteria –
yours were different in some cases than what we had used. Then we looked at the
indicators that we had presented this morning and discussed the word
“traditional” in reference to whether it pertains to indigenous and
non-indigenous populations.
Then we reviewed the SLiCA data and looked at what we might be able to find or
collect for our domain. Then we invited, or co-opted Igor and Jack back to our
group. We needed Igor because we had no Russian representation in our group and
it is important to know what might work in Russia. Igor said the most universal
subsistence practice across all arctic nations is fishing and it might be our
best indicator, with the disclaimer that it might be easiest to gather. He also
talked about consistency across the groups. SLiCA can’t be replicated although
it’s fine and good.
Then we asked Jack to review the tables he put in the Ties to Nature category.
We think that Participdation in Traditional Activities has potential for us. We
had identified that. But we had trouble with the word “traditional”. The word
“outdoor” is fine, but it doesn’t cover activities that can be done indoors.
Then we looked at the lists of activities from SLiCA and tried to figure out
which activities might be relevant to our different regions and might be
different from those in the SLiCA index. That is activities that would be
relevant for men and women and both indigenous and non-indigenous people. We
reviewed the SLiCA lists and feel they are mainly appropriate for indigenous
populations. We then looked at that kind of list of activities for
non-indigenous populations, like bird watching although we agreed both
populations could do both lists.
Then we had a wonderful discussion about the philosophical aspects of this
domain for our chapter: humans and nature; different regions; different
languages. We found wonderful examples of cross-cultural examples of
misunderstandings related to activities in nature. We talked about that at
length. I would like to address this to the material well-being domain. We
talked about “birgit”: “it is more important to be ‘birgit’ than to be rich.
Magne Ove
We have a word in Saami “birgit” which means “to feel good” – That would
translate the above to: “it is more important to manage or survive with the
activities you are doing than to be rich.” If you ask a reindeer herder if he is
getting rich with his industry, he will probably answer “I survive” – it’s an
important concept not only for Saami but around the arctic.
Bruce
It also relates to education. It’s important to know how to make a fire in the
rain or be able to be out in nature.
Leslie
We talked about some of the SLiCA data about what you learned as a child and
what are you teaching your children. We also talked about the health of the
ecosystem as an indicator – wildlife populations; safety of wild food; ecosystem
population fluctuations, etc.
We talked about going to the SLiCA education data to see how relevant those
might be for our two groups. The bottom line is, we haven’t eliminated any of
our indicators, but we are focusing in on participation in activities as an
indicator.
Cultural Viability (Peter S)
I know I took some notes; as I indicated this morning, our group has had an
interesting discussion; we have seven participants but only two of us were in
Akureyri. Basically we went back to the drawing board. I outlined the stuff we
talked about before. While things were not exactly rejected; we started where
the seven of us are. Not at the same place as back in Akureyri..
The seven participants introduced their own perspectives and worries. At some
point there was a breakthrough when Igor suggested an area – sub-domains within
our domain. He was trying to label them so they also make sense for indigenous
communities – “belonging” knowing” and “appreciating” which was thrown out and
renamed “satisfaction” and “participating” – we would have needed another hour
to come to closure on these issues. The basic understanding is that “belonging”
and “knowing” will most likely survive under these labels into the next round.
We started to talk about specific indicators for these realms. We thought that
some kind of language indicator will be for knowing. For “belonging” we drifted
to some kind of demographic indicators: Do young people remain? gender balance
of young cohorts in a given locality.
Self-identification; who are you? How do you identify yourself? what is your
main self-identification? Are you of a particular ethnic group? Are you
Norwegian or Saami, etc.? I would characterize our deliberations as productive.
There is one additional step we made: we gave ourselves a final name. We’ve been
cultural viability and cultural vitality, but we rejected this in favour of
cultural well-being. It is also another way of cross-connecting with material
well-being – cultural well being. It is something easily understood and rather
neutral where some other words have potential problems. That is an important
issue and I think we made important gains in discussing these issues. But we
need more time.
There is also the issue of violence. While we concentrated on the positive
aspects of being and well-being; we also discussed at some length,
violence—suicide, ill being. Knowing the sensitivity of these issues in the
north, we felt they need to be addressed. We hope they will be addressed in the
health chapter—but they cannot just be relegated to the health chapter. We
probably want to address them also in a chapter on cultural wellbeing, and
spirituality in some form probably needs to address these issues. That doesn’t
mean we will be suggesting a violence indicator; but something to be addressed
as a group.
Finally there were, of course, other things that came up such as demography,
especially in belonging. We have overlapping issues with the material well-being
group and the closeness to nature group. We felt that a number of cultural
indicators have to do with these things and there were indications that
closeness to nature is itself a cultural value. We could also see a need for
more cross-pollination or coordination to get the best out of it.
Gunn-Britt
The subject of knowing it is also “knowing how to survive” we also agree that
knowing how to survive belongs to the closeness to nature group. The concept of
knowing is how to survive more than anything else.
Igor
Tomorrow it would be nice for us to merge or exchange ideas with the education
group because both knowing and belonging have to do with local education – where
it works and where it does not.
Puju
I just want to say I appreciate the mentioning of self identification;
especially the self perception of identification concept.
Peter S
I would like to add one detail here. We said we are willing to, at least
partially, violate the concept of Pan-Arctic. In the cultural well-being domain,
we will be speaking more to indigenous issues – cultural well being needs to
address indigenous issues more; though the entire report focuses on the entire
population.
Fate Control (Jens)
Listening to the others we were the good guys and birds. We decided to follow
Larry and his theme of “you can’t always get what you want.” We ended up with
about seven indicators. The indicators we deleted were not because they were
irrelevant, but usually because of a lack of good data available. Maybe that
will go into an explanatory section of our chapter. One of the indicators we
ended up with is participation and representation. When we discussed these
issues we talked about local, national and regional levels. We feel we must have
all three levels. Participation and representation is an important one.
Evolution – of authority or empowerment is another. We wanted to find some bases
we could operate with. Which of these bases can we put on or find data for? –
local personnel—has this body authority over health resources. We also looked at
local control of resources; the generation of income. This might be a useful
indicator. We want to keep it a little bit aside because we might be able to use
it to test if we use other indicators.
Access to information;
Rights to land and sea resources;
And then we were left with local control over key industries. When we came to
human rights we decided it was a human right to be tired so we left that to
tomorrow. We had a good discussion on the practicalities of each of these
indicators.
Andrey
Some of these concepts are tough to come up with values. We thought we might
score different levels as to authority by entity. The outcome would be a score
that a community or region would earn – it should be compatible – how would we
conceive this to start with. We might have to find percents, intervals or
values.
Igor
How do you see your group evolution? You came down from 14 indicators to seven,
and you haven’t discussed the issue of human rights. Will you come up with seven
sub-domains? 1 or 2 indicators with sub-domains? If all six groups are coming
together from six different deliberation processes, that will be hard work for
our leaders to bring it together. How do you see your evolution tomorrow?
Gail
I think we’re hoping we might narrow it down a bit more. At one point we talked
about testing it alone against a more complex one and see if there’s a
correlation between the complex one and the simple indicator; if so, we throw
out the more complex indicator. We want to see how to boil it down to composite
indexes.
Igor
You went to the process of giving scores to the regions. Our group threw the
concept of governmental statistics out and focused on self- identification and
self-evaluations—things that could be gathered from individuals only. It is
important to all of us to agree upon what we do – but also on what we don’t do.
Joan
Tomorrow we will have some discussion on how to streamline this to use the same
procedures and criteria. Today we wanted free brainstorming.
Igor
If I may add one word, I would endorse the nice experience I got by being
invited to another group and then having Jack join our group. Let people
fluctuate so there is more sharing – if we sit in our individual clusters we
will be too different. We are disciplined people. If you assign us to a group,
we do that.
Joan
It is important that there are overlaps and we need to sort that out.
Birger
I think it is important that the process continues until each group has a more
comprehensive idea of where they want to go. If our marching orders are too
structured, we might not be able to conclude the discussions we’re in the midst
of. We don’t necessarily need one instrument to develop all the indicators we
need. There might be the use of a variety of tools here.
Igor
Do we have a body that represents all the groups together? Is there an executive
team?
Joan
We have the working groups; we have the team leaders; the team leaders don’t
have as much flexibility; and then I have been putting off announcing the
executive board but we are in the process of establishing an executive
committee; Peter, me, Gail and one other or maybe two other persons who will
have final responsibility of the report. We hope to be able to announce that
tomorrow.
Bruce
We do have more than one team leader. We have co-team leaders. I think getting
fresh blood (or meat depending how desperate the group is) is a good idea. We
have new members but I think having more structure would be helpful. Even for 15
minutes would help.
Gail
What if we have fate control disband and everyone go to other groups; etc. So no
one misses any key points within their own group’s discussion?
Peter
Tomorrow we’ll talk about this again.
Saturday, June 9 : Break out session continues
Peter S
It looks like fewer people today, doesn’t it? So assuming that we have enough
people and that everyone’s here, let’s get started. According to the program we
go immediately into domain groups, but let’s take a few minutes for a couple
things.
First and foremost we want to give you a charge. The next plenary is after
lunch. Yesterday it was brought up that we need to agree on unified criteria for
dimensions of the indicators. We want to charge all domain groups to think about
that from the perspective of their domain. This includes the issues of scale.
Some may feel it is not a problem to have heterogeneity in the scaling but
others may think we need a rigid scale. Discuss it in your groups and maybe
after lunch we will bring it up in the plenary.
The other thing that we would like to decide now is the issue of the exchanges
among domain groups. We consider Gail’s suggestion might be the most feasible –
the suggestion was that each group would be assigned a time to disburse into the
other groups and then re-gather.
We need to be organized so not all groups disperse at the same time.
Susie
So we’re essentially spying on each other. We don’t have to cram all six groups
into this morning – half this morning and half this afternoon. With three hours
this morning, each group could shut down for half an hour and disburse to other
groups, is half an hour enough, or shall we take more time and basically take
the whole day for shuffling around.
Larry H
I think that it would be helpful to meet in our own domain long enough to get an
outline for chapters before breaking up.
Peter S
Individual groups may not be ready – we were not ready – we would need an hour
or two to really get somewhere, so speaking for our group we might take until
noon until we’re ready to break up. Which group is ready this morning to disband
in the near future.
Lee
The purpose of disbanding and meeting with the other groups is to develop our
group perspective.
Peter S
You want some inspiration, but if you’re too fuzzy it might not help. Only each
domain group can decide for themselves whether they want to do that now.
Leslie
I think we could do that now.
Bruce
Uhhhh. …Let’s get together first.
Peter S
There is an idea for bilateral meetings which I think is good, but the question
is how to logistically combine these things?
Yvon
When people meet it’s a black box – we listen or interact.
Peter S
The rationale for Gail’s suggestion is that people going from group to group can
be instructive and by shutting down your own group you’re not losing any part of
your own discussion.
Jens
I suggest that we leave it until the afternoon because it seems the groups are
not ready yet. Let’s get more organized.
Peter S
So in the morning we’ll continue with exchanges as you please and may mean some
bilateral coordination. The charge to each domain group is: what would make
sense from your perspective in terms of general criteria for the indicators? How
narrow or broad do we want them?
Joan
In your groups, continue to think about consultation and review. We need to have
that discussion and make an agreement on the procedure for that before we leave
tomorrow. Maybe towards the end of the day we may try to get to that earlier
than the agenda indicates.
Peter S
Any questions or comments? If not, go to domain breakout groups. Coffee is at
10:30. Lunch at 12 o’clock and after lunch we meet here.
1:15 PM Plenary: Brief reporting and discussion
Peter S
Thank you for being so disciplined and starting early. As Joan promised, we will
try to finish early if we can. Now, according to the program this is to be a
brief reporting and discussion but we can be flexible. Does every group want to
report, or do we want to delay that and then just report once later in the
afternoon?
Brief Report on Ties to Nature (Leslie)
To be brief, we looked at the three indicators we had decided upon. We reported
on our “participation in outdoor activities yesterday. Today we looked at the
remaining three. For each of these we subjected them to scrutiny: we looked at
the criteria that determined whether they would be useful indicators; looked at
– we designed a consultation process for each of these indicators – some are
similar in process. We agreed up on our promising indicators; decided how to
measure them in different regions; looked at evaluation criteria; looked at data
availability and used that as the determinator.
For each of them we have a different consultation process. First, obviously the
Arctic Council is one place where we can consult. The permanent participants are
important in this. The World Reindeer Association is entity we want to consult;
of course the AC Sustainable Development Working Group is another place; Also,
the Indigenous Peoples Secretariat, RAIPON, ICC, Statistics Canada. We decided
we need to consult with Turinn and Solveig – also the Saami Institute and
indigenous research institutions. We decided not to do community consultation at
this point; it’s too much. In Canada we can look at land claims and engage
schools. One of our indicators was “existence and extent of place-based
education”. For that we could consult with national ministries of education to
find out how they integrate place-based education and traditional education into
school curricula.
We were going to consult with BOREAS also and use existing research projects.
Peter S
Excuse me – is this consultation or data gathering?
Leslie
It’s both. One of the things we will consult about is what data exists; if they
can provide data great – if they can’t that may be a strike against that
indicator. It’s consultation with an end to help with data.
Joan
This kind of AC consultation process is similar to what we did with AHDR – and
because we are an AC project, I have made arrangements with SWDG that our drafts
will reviewed by SDWG members. They will have a password to go into our website
and send comments. This approach is primarily for transparency purposes. Clearly
the overall consultation will have to be broader than that. We will have to find
individuals committed to reviewing our drafts.
Susie
Didn’t you say you got few responses to this approach for review with the AHDR?
Joan
We had the process where they could send comments but we hardly got any. We did
get comments when we sent drafts to identified peers who had agreed to review
the drafts.
Gunn-Britt
There are a lot of other groups you might consider such as reindeer herder
observers etc.
Joan
We can make the website as open as you are comfortable with although we will
want to be in control of who has the password. It could have two different
passwords.
Leslie
We might be able to get a better response with specific questions.
Joan
Academic peer review is critical. We need to identify people who are
knowledgeable in these areas.
Peter S
In that mail review process there were representatives from the Permanent
Participants that were reviewers – and some organizations.
Joan
We got comments from many of the PPs, but usually it was a small correction,
like they felt we had excluded a particular village.
Peter S
Which is also important.
Joan
It is important we get all this.
Bruce
At some stage, can we get these questions into Russian to get penetration in to
Russia? Would that be possible?
Joan
We should consider – we don’t have a huge set of questions to translate into
Russian
Peter S
It’s a money issue to translate the drafts.
Bruce
I was thinking the questions to targeted people. Rather than just up to the
Arctic Council. More targeted questions to people who might have answers.
Joan
I had suggested maybe using the SLiCA network as a consultation connection – you
seem to be well connected and have contacts at that level.
Peter S
Leslie, your group did a good job. Did any of the other groups have time to
spend on this consultation process? From, even if you did have time to discuss
it, is there anything critical missing? For me a key point in Leslie’s proposal
is do not involve the communities at this point –because it’s unrealistic. Are
there other opinions out there?
If we don’t do it now then the report is written at some point but I think it is
a fundamental decision to be made.
Jack
The network we are talking about is connecting with the ICC. Those people live
in communities. We want to connect with people who can bring perspectives – not
connecting with “communities”, but connecting with “people who live in
communities.”
Leslie
In many cases it is consulting with experts who live in communities. It give us
more bang for the buck.
Peter S
There may be 1000 communities we’re talking about in the area. It will be a very
high number, so I think it is a complex process to do that – 1, 5 or 10
communities would be impossible for the whole arctic.
Joan
I guess the question is how to what extent does that community consultation
include our brainstorming or just the final list of our indicators.
Peter S
Another important issue is that there is no point going to individual
communities, but instead involve indigenous research institutes. I think that
there is, unfortunately, a limited number of these research institutes.
Bruce
There are bodies like reindeer herders that can be targeted for feedback on a
few questions translated in Russian.
Gunn-Britt
Indigenous research institutions may not cover the whole of the arctic. If there
are individual researchers, I don’t know.
Igor
I don’t think we have to be perfectionist—we cannot cover all of the arctic. We
just need productive feedback. We’ll send this draft to 20 or 30 organizations
and get 5 responses; of those, 3 will be useful – it doesn’t need to be an open
message because we won’t get the response.
Vladmir
I know they will make an agreement with some indigenous peoples to develop
specific indicators showing the indigenous issues. We are close to connecting
with them. It is easier to be in contact with these people and try to connect
them with our considerations.
Peter S
You’re talking about this conventional biological diversity.
Vladmir
The Union grant for Development of Biodiversity Indicators. But it also includes
social-cultural indicators as well.
Yvon
The report that we are writing now is not going to be implemented right away. We
propose indicators and then there will be a time gap between that moment and
implementation. The big consultation will be to get this report out to a general
public that will have time to react to see if it will identify. We are not
harming anyone by publishing the report.
Joan
That would be the last stage of the consultation.
Yvon
That’s an argument for not implementing an exhaustive consultation.
Peter S
We can finalize the consultation issues in the morning. There is a general
agreement on the direction and we can leave it for now. Are there other issues
for discussion now?
Joan
I was just thinking: one thing that has been raised is that we need to be in
agreement on the basics on how to structure things; assessing things; so that we
have a common approach to our work, so there’s consistency. This is something we
could over the next little while by sending out suggestions in a document as to
what criteria we need to agree on and a procedure. It may be difficult, given
our time restrictions here, to come to agreement right now. It may be that some
of us should make a suggestion and then get feedback and then agree over email
on the procedures. Any comments?
Peter S
I would really suggest we release ourselves into our small groups. I believe
some domains are ready for interaction. The initial idea of disbanding whole
groups is not so good. What are we actually doing? Your group was asking for a
bi-lateral meeting with cultural well being and fate control. That would mean
that the old idea is not good.
Leslie
We’ve been having floaters and that’s working well.
Joan
Should we meet back here at 4:30 to wrap it up?
2:00 PM Break out session continues
Peter S
We were wondering how soon you want to go home. Let’s be quick. There’s one
change to the agenda tomorrow – at 10:30 tomorrow there’s a joint session with
BOREAS. We can use that as a listening time for our wrap up for a longer final
presentation of our six domains. So I think that’s where we really try to have
our presentations as polished as possible. We will have an extra set of ears who
can ask unpleasant questions.
Joan
We will have 10 new sets of ears coming tomorrow for the joint session. It is a
good opportunity for the domains to report and get feedback. Probably the
discussion will end up being focused on how these indicators might be used in a
migration context. But it will be a good way to get feedback. That’s tomorrow
from 10:30-12 but before that we will have a chance to meet and wrap up loose
ends.
Saturday closing session
Peter S
Since we have the big reporting session for tomorrow morning, there’s no need
right now. Those who want to are welcome. Which group feels an urgent need?
Joan
Maybe it would be good for a minute to see if you feel you are on the right
track, if there are problem areas if we know now, maybe others can think about
it overnight.
Bruce
If we don’t have a deal breaker now we’ll have one in the morning.
Joan
Anyone who feels the urge – health?
Health/Demographics (Larry H)
We have an outline for our chapter and a list of who will draft which pieces;
and of course we gave a lot to Peter B because he’s not here. We talked about
the indicators, the concepts and how they may relate to the other fields being
worked on here. We also talked about some examples.
Education (Rasmus)
Tomorrow we are going to present the one indicator we have decided on. It
relates well to all the other domains so we’ll save it as a surprise for
tomorrow. We will present in the text of our chapter how we came up with it and
how the outcome will be.
Peter S
Education has one indicator, does health and demography have several?
Material well being (Lee)
I think we’re on the right track, like all indicators there are the dimensions
of well-being we can’t be totally inclusive. We’re trying to collapse indexes:
to collapse money income, traditional harvest income and transfers into one
index. We have sort of an outline of the chapter and I think we’re on the right
track.
Fate Control (Gail)
We haven’t narrowed down to one or two or three indicators; we still have more
than that. We wanted to do more research on them over the next little while and
build each one out and have assigned people in the group to see whether they’re
doable or any that correlate so well with others so we can throw one out. We set
up deadlines but those are tentative. And then we discussed a little more
consultation and reviews issues and a brief outline of the chapter.
Cultural Continuity (Yvon)
After a number of discussions yesterday, we realized there were two subcultures
among us which reflected two subcultures in the world out there: fragile
indigenous cultures and autonomy of cultures. We’re trying to find higher level
ways of seeing if those cultures are doing ok. Cultures themselves determine
what’s good for them. In that situation it’s not like saying those people are
keeping traditions alive. The best indicator is like fate or control over one’s
affairs – how much local cultures are able to control institutionally and with
resources. Not only to have the institutions in place for cultural goal pursuit,
but including teaching Native languages and the resources to do that. Tomorrow
we will have the indicator for that.
Igor
A simple and practical indicator.
Yvon
At the end of the afternoon it was fruitful to meet with different groups. We
just discussed with the close to nature group one aspect not covered anywhere.
It is the whole thing of kinship sharing, social networks which are important in
arctic communities. A proxy is the size of the informal economy and in some
regions of the arctic we can have some good indexes on that and in others we
would have to make recommendations to make better statistics available. From the
education group we realized something we have to look at again is the informal
aspect of education. The transmission of knowledge – how well is cultural
knowledge transmitted from one generation to another. We still have to look into
that.
Ties to Nature (Leslie)
We are left with four indicators, one of which is close to an ideal indicator
but has extremely limited data available, and is problematic because of
differences in arctic nations – participation in traditional/outdoor activities.
We also have three more indicators; one relates to existence and extent of
place-based education – education in traditional pursuits and on the
land—probably has pretty readily available data. A fairly narrow, but we think a
fairly good proxy is time on the land. We struggled with number of nights spent
on the land, which was originally what Nils wanted because we thought that was
extreme contact with the land. Our last indicator is consumption of country food
as a percentage of food consumed. We think that there is some data available,
but we’re mixed on that one. So we have four indicators, one of which we will
probably will have to reject.\
We outlined our chapter. The first section will be a literature review and
definition of the concept of contact with nature. Second will be a section
identifying the whole suite of indicators we’ve discussed and our evaluation
process. Then our third section will be how and why we identified and advocated
the three indicators we got to. Finally, we make recommendations about
consultation and the results of the consultation process and recommend one
indicator for the final chapter of the report. We’ve also put together a lot of
wonderful photographs about contact with nature and we’ve developed some boxes
that are illustrative of the concepts. We’re excited about the chapter.
Joan
To wrap this up, I think this was useful. I think people have come far. It
sounds like most groups are more or less at the same point: mapped out chapters
and structures of chapters sound similar, even though we haven’t determined that
yet. We will have to identify team leaders to decide on the format of chapters
so we end up with a common structure throughout. It sounds like we are on the
same page.
Larry H
Maybe tomorrow we should talk about scale again. What are we talking about –
nations, villages, individuals or indigenous – some are more open-ended. We need
to articulate what units of measure would be meaningful.
Andrey
We had a concern or question about deadlines.
Joan
We will talk about that tomorrow.
Joan
I guess one of the remaining practical things is the timeline (click for
summary) – what expectations we have regarding timeline – consensus about dates.
In terms of that, we would like to set a date for the first draft of the domain
work; what we have been talking about is November 1st. It would be a good
opportunity to leave enough time to have some drafts back and forth, so if the
first draft is submitted on November 1st and then Jack, maybe you would like to
explain our December thing.
Jack
There is an international organization called the International Society for
Quality of Life Studies (ISQLS). It’s an organization composed of economists,
sociologists and even an anthropologist or two. They proved to be helpful with
the SLICA team at a 2001 conference in Nuuk. Not only were they constructive,
but very friendly and had good advice. Last summer we presented SLiCA results at
their annual conference in Grahamstown, SA and they were keenly interested in
the arctic activities. We looked to them as a valuable peer review group that
represents the int’l community. They in turn asked Birger and me to organize an
arctic session at their meeting in San Diego, CA, December 6-8, 2007.
Birger and I thought it would be valuable to bring our collective ASI thinking
to that meeting and invite 3 ISQLS people to be discussants. We found out with
SLiCA that it is not just the 1.5 or 2 hours of the session that is of value,
but the discussants become mentors. Our proposal is to involve representatives
of the six domains to bring a concise presentation to this meeting and involve 3
ISQLS people in that session.
Joan
I think this is an excellent opportunity to get reviews from outside our group.
With our goal for first drafts of November 1st, it’s perfect timing. We would be
making these drafts available for the SDWG feedback.
Peter S
There are a few details to work out – November 1st – deadline for the first
review which will be an internal review. In November we have to send it out for
mail review too. We will have to determine what shape the drafts will be in on
November 1st.
Joan
The next thing we want to do, is sometime early in 2008, we would like to
organize a small meeting with a representative from each of the domains and the
project leaders to go through all the drafts to be sure they are consistent and
see if there are problem areas.
Peter S
This is still open in terms of the dates, but we will want to have second drafts
by that point. Assuming we have comments back in January or so from all the
different reviewers, then we would expect lead authors of the chapters to
produce second drafts by maybe March 1st. The next (small group) meeting would
follow shortly after draft 2 receipt.
Joan
And then of course our big final event will be ICAS in 2008 – I have already
submitted my proposal to the president and vice president (I hope I won’t be
rejected) for a session for us on arctic social indicators – either a full
morning or full afternoon session. The way we would structure it would be each
domain would present findings and then we would have some invited discussants
from outside our group. We would invite questions from the audience to give us
feedback on our work. We are sort of committed to having things done by then. If
something comes up at that meeting, we might still be able to adjust our work.
Shortly after the Nuuk conference, we will launch the report: first as a web
version and then in a printed format like the AHDR. I was talking to Igor last
night – if we aim for something like AHDR it can look like volume 2.
Peter
I guess the Arctic Council ministerial meeting is in fall of 2008.
Birger
It is going to be in spring of 2009.
Joan
That would obviously be the time when we would have to make some big
presentation to show our product. Maybe we could have the official launch of it
at that time. There is another opportunity – the Northern Research Forum in
Anchorage. We have the secretariat at Stefansson Arctic Institute – Lee Huskey
one of the local hosts. It’s just right after Nuuk, so I’m not sure many of us
can get to Alaska so close to Nuuk, but that might be another opportunity for
having some kind of a launch or at least a session.
Lee
That would make sense and there will be people there who will be interested.
Leslie
The dates are September 24-27.
Peter S
That will be a month later.
Joan
So this is, in broad strokes, how we foresee the next years’ developments. Do
any of you have suggestions of how to create more structure to the writing? What
we will be doing, maybe a few weeks from now when I’m back at the office, is to
write out this more detailed timeline. So far we have just have fall and winter
and spring as goals.
Leslie
It’s probably not too early to design a launch with press release etc.
Joan
I wonder if Nuuk would be a place to have a meeting with the media or something.
Maybe we should organize that.
Igor
Will the new report have separate illustrative stories like the AHDR had in
boxes?
Peter S
I like that format.
Igor
Those stories can be collected independently earlier in the process. That would
give you co-editors more flexibility.
Peter S
In AHDR the chapter authors were responsible for those boxes and stories. It is
for all authors here to envision. That is probably the next item to discuss –
structure.
Joan
Igor was suggesting that we make it clear that in designing the chapters it not
just technical writing. We want to be telling a story. There’s text and telling
people the story of life and well-being in the Arctic. If we don’t have a lot of
success with the indicators themselves, we still have a product that is useful
from the educational perspective.
Peter S
A majority of the chapters will be continuations of chapters in the AHDR.
Clearly in cultural domain there will be a lot of connection to the AHDR
chapter. Are there more comments about the timeline? If not, let’s talk about
the structure. We will send out an email with more specifics about structure.
One thing is clear from the beginning and that is that part of your chapter will
be devoted to PROCESS. You must explain to readers how you got to the limited
amount of indicators at the end. It is important to explain that and in many
cases will take the majority of the chapter. Otherwise, it will lead to
questions from readers of why this indicator was chosen and why not some other
indicator. We need to take the time and space to explain our process. It is
important to cover the other aspects we can’t cover in describing one or two
indicators. Leslie’s group gave us a first outline of their chapter which
started with an overview. What is the domain about, what kind of work has been
done about it – and a literature review. That seems natural as well. These are
the two major content blocks that need to be in there. But – do people here have
other suggestions that could, should or should not be there?
Gail
Ours follows that structure as well. Why fate control is a domain; what we mean
by fate control. We were wondering how much would be in a global chapter. We
will go through and discuss the first 15 areas of interest and then why we chose
the indicator or indicators and discuss our rationale. We talked about sidebars;
there are wonderful stories that have been told in this process – illustrative
examples.
Joan
I think it makes sense to start with a chapter on human development in the
arctic and social indicator as a global chapter. Then have a global methods
chapter that includes what is an indicator; what is a proxy; what are the
criteria. Then we would have the 6 domain chapters and then the concluding
chapter where we have the final set of recommended indicators.
Peter
In short it will not be just 6 chapters but probably 10 chapters, including an
introduction.
Birger
The question, or proposal I guess, is that in the chapter on human development
there should be – if not a special chapter; a paragraph on social indicators and
what that is about.
Peter S
There will be some specialists on international indicator research who will be
volunteered probably.
Leslie
And I guess our final chapter will present our Arctic Human Development Index.
Puju
I’m thinking we should remember who the audience is when we discuss how we are
going to structure it. It is the Arctic Council.
Joan
We have two audiences – the same as with AHDR; The Arctic Council is an
important one, but also the universities and the University of the Arctic – for
example the AHDR is being used extensively as curriculum and teaching material.
We have to keep that in mind when we structure this report.
Peter S
If I understand Puju, we have to remember this is a big responsibility. The last
chapter is a summary; what are we distilling out of our work. The issue there is
that Joan and I will be the authors and it needs to reflect our collective
thinking, so everyone needs to have the opportunity to have input.
Jack
We discussed what we mean in the final analysis about time and cost. We came up
with a spectrum; at the bottom end of our spectrum we assess what data is
collected already that’s robust enough and available today; next on the spectrum
is what could be added that would improve what we could track over time at
little or no cost--could something be added to currently existing data
collections – examples of how we can improve our proxies.
Peter S
Two or more scenarios of what could be implemented without too much additional
money and what could be implemented with some effort.
Gail
Measures that might be complicated but would be interesting possibilities for
researchers and policymakers.
Igor
One word of prudence in organizing our review process, since it often takes as
much time for the review process as to write the report, when you submit rough
drafts for review, if they are too rough, reviewers may have less respect. When
you submit something in a more finished form people respect you more. If the
deadline is November 1st and the meeting in San Diego is the beginning of
December, I suggest we have our small circle be the review – 40 people to read
each other’s chapters and make comments before opening it up. It would give you,
in San Diego, a more refined document before we open it up to intellectual
upgrading. We all went through this from one stage to another one. I suggest we
use it to the most extent before inviting others to it.
Peter S
This is a very useful suggestion. Joan and I need to make sure that by the
summer of next year – the deadline is August – basically a year from now we need
to be at a point when chapters are more or less in their final form. That means
we don’t have too much time for multiple review stages; but this will allow at
least two stages.
Igor
Will you use the same book designer?
Joan
It would make sense if the money can be raised. The layout and design were very
expensive for the AHDR.
Peter S
Do we have any money for book production?
Joan
We have budgeted money – just for a Nordic Council of Ministers production. This
is according to the rules if the NCM is funding more than 50 percent of our
budget, they have the right to publish. What I have in the budget is the money
they require me to put in the budget for their publication. When we get around
to 2008, we will seek money for the big book printed version. Here we are
looking for quite a bit of money to get the quality of AHDR.
Tatiana
I would like to make it somehow parallel to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment
Report. I was nominated to the policy document team. What they did, and I
suppose it will be valuable and needed for chairs of this ASI to make contact
with the ministry in Russia which is now responsible for SDWG; you know this
ministry changed. But now is ministry of regional development. I think you need
to make contact with those persons who will be responsible for this SDWG in
Russia. I called them, but I didn’t receive any other call because they are now
taking the documents from one ministry to another. In Arctic Climate Impact
Assessment there was a Russian responsible for this report. I think it is
needed.
Peter S
We have some experience with the Arctic Human Development Report which was
different from ACIAR.
Tatiana
I think there should be a consultation with our ministers.
Peter S
They will be part of the consultation process we talked about yesterday.
Joan
Any last minutes concerns?
Peter S
The main thing is if you will be leaving here in a few hours—minutes. The main
question is do you know what you will have to do? There will be some more
written instructions coming. In general do people understand their tasks or
responsibilities in the next year or month? We don’t want too many question
marks left standing. If not, then. . .
Igor
The only final comment is a thank you to the organizers. I believe it was a
wonderful time well spent, well organized. I think we have to thank Joan and
Peter for doing this. You are a very pleasant combination of hands on/hands off.
Peter S
This is the last session for ASI workshop. We’re almost done!!!!! Now that we’ve
been joined by the BOREAS group, I suggest the following; take a few minutes to
say who we are and where we come from – no elaborations. Just so we can
associate names and where we come from.
Introductions
Joan
You will probably get a chance to talk about yourselves at the BOREAS workshop.
What we are hoping to do here today is to hold a joint session. We have already
sort of finished the ASI workshop – this is an idea session as an add-on. We
have just finished 2.5 days of workshop. Arctic Social Indicators – it is to
design a small set of indicators to help us track and monitor human development
in the arctic. We are endorsed by the AC and we are a follow-up to the AHDR.
What we were hoping to do today is to give the BOREAS people an opportunity to
hear what we have been doing.
We would like to take the next hour and a half to give each domain group in our
project a chance to present a status on where they are at and that will form the
background for discussion and feedback. They will describe the indicators we are
working on and what the link is between human development and migration, which
we hope will help you see how what we are doing may help you in your migration
work.
Maybe I should explain our domains. Within our work on social indicators we have
six domain areas. We have divided our group into working groups for each of
those domain areas and are working on creating indicators. Three of the domains
are based on the domains that come from the UN human development program:
education; health/demography; and material well being. In addition, we have
three domain groups that have grown out of the AHDR; fate control; cultural
vitality; and closeness to nature. As the domain groups do your reporting,
perhaps you can define what the domain is about for those who are not familiar.
Okay, how much time for each group?
Peter S
Let’s not take all the time with presentations – five minutes for each group,
and definitely not more than 10 minutes. The idea is that we have an exchange
here for the ASI people to get feedback from those of you new here today. Fresh
brain cells. We hope some of what we are doing here can inform you for the next
2.5 days.
Joan
Maybe we should start with Fate Control:
ASI Domain Group Closing Presentations
Fate Control (Gail)
(PDF Presentation linked)
We have already talked about some of this. It is important to control your
destination. So, we have divided this group into several sub-areas in terms of
determining one’s fate: political power or political activism; decision making;
economic control; knowledge construction; and human rights. Originally we had 15
different indicators that we were looking at and we’ve narrowed it down this
far. In the next few months we want to look into these further and see if we can
pull out a proxy, but we’re not convinced of what yet.
In terms of political activism, we are looking at voting participation and
representation – the group wanted to work across as many scales as possible from
local to national. This would work well at least at the regional and national
levels. We’re also looking at how many seats per capita for representation. We
are also looking at these indicators in terms of what we can test against SLiCA
data. SLiCA has participation in elections and a count of voting.
We are still trying to wrap our heads around decision making power to see how to
make it an indicator. We think possible components might include ‘proportion of
local personnel’ and ‘local control over institutions.’
For economic control we’re dealing with three areas:
1. Rights to land and sea resources. This would be a check-box yes/no approach and could be done in regional and national levels.
2. Self-generated income. Joan is going to give us help with self-generated income and will provide an indicator for that.
3. Local control over key industries.
We’re wondering if self-generated income
might be a proxy for a larger dimension of fate control.
We’re interested in the idea of “knowledge construction.” Your access to
different types of information such as number of newspaper subscriptions,
published newspapers, internet addresses, radio broadcasting etc. Rune has
already looked into this to some extent and will develop that one. We had
another component which was knowledge or information about politics.
For the area of human rights we suggest nations’ signatories to international
conventions. That would have to be on the national level. We wanted to look into
the possibility of an indicator here.
We had an interesting discussion about language control as possibly being a good
proxy for fate control –if you can control your ability to have your language in
education and medical services. There is SLiCA data on that.
There were other indicators we found interesting; some of these were:
• Resistance,
• place names, and
• perceived political influence.
In our chapter we will discuss why these would be interesting to have later, but they would take community measures and boiling it down.
The last part is our chapter outline.
• Why Fate Control is Important/What is important
• {+lit review?}
• Process of Coming to Indicators (if not in earlier global chapter)
• 15 areas of interest –under 5 general areas
• – importance, why included or not
• Chosen indicators/measures –
• why these and caveats
• Sidebars on illlustrative ‘case studies’/ issues
We talked about the need for having academics who are indicator specialists and we’ve done some brainstorming of who we might use to be testers or consultants on this. We just had some questions. We did want to talk about scale – can you compare oblasts and territories in Canada – what are the comparable units in terms of local, national and regional units?
Andrey
Do we want to ask the baseline question?
Gail
In terms of testing, we figure we are going to end up with baseline data and we
want to talk about how much this will produce a little baseline for global
indicators. The next stage may be the baseline development. For a while we felt
we were ahead but we are trying to develop these indicators further so we can
then toss out some. We want to test those that seem simplistic but might be good
proxies and hopefully bring up correlations. Finally, we set deadlines that work
with the deadlines established for all of us this morning.
Andrey
We want to set up the indicators and use SLiCA to “ground truth” them. Then we
may reject redundant ones. It will be good to use SLiCA for ground truthing.
Peter S
For some of you who don’t know, SLiCA is Survey of Living Conditions in the
Arctic. Two of the fathers of that project are here in the room. The first
results of that project are here and are also available on the web. It’s a
wonderful resource for all of us.
Lee
And both Birger and Jack will be with us for the next few days so you can talk
to them later.
Gail
If any of you have questions or ideas, I want to take them down.
Peter S
Maybe we should – it’s difficult to just jump in here. What is presented here is
the basis for chapters to be written. Each of six domain groups are about to
start drafting chapters and part of the exercise is to get to a limited amount
of indicators. We hope no group will come up with more than 3 indicators.
Larry H
I think some of this may come up in all indicators is that you have some concept
of local or indigenous people – that’s often something you’re dividing into
something else – just to count the number of Saami – who’s local and who’s not –
for all of us who have indicators – even at the most basic level of who is or
who isn’t or how many are there it’s difficult.
Andrey
We describe local as those present at the previous census.
Larry H
Some of these ideas are using a different idea of local control.
Gail
Those are things we will have to define and define homogenously throughout.
Peter S
Data – there will be a number of potential indicators along the way, but it may
not be your final set. There needs to be some kind of baseline data in there as
part of your argument for that indicator group.
Gail.
Yes.
BOREAS Speaker 1
What happens when a community or nation falls below the baseline?
Peter S
What we are doing here is an academic exercise. Part of our audience is the AC
and stakeholders of the AC. We hope we are making some policy recommendations to
the Arctic Council and their Permanent Participatns which are indigenous
organizations and observer organizations.
Boreas Speaker 2
What countries are taking part in this exercise? What countries are you
analyzing?
Peter S
It’s Pan-Arctic. Okay, if there are no more questions, we go to cultural well
being. Yvon will start.
Cultural Well-being. (Yvon)
(PDF Presentation linked)
So, a lot of things are in the prolongation of the AHDR chapter Peter and I
wrote on Society and Nature. It’s not the best topic covered by statistics. One
of the concepts we refine a bit is what we meant in the AHDR. Originally it was
“maintaining cultural identity”. We rephrase it as “cultural well-being” rather
than maintenance; viability and so on because we had difficulty deciding whether
it was to maintain and continue traditional cultures that were at risk under
rapid changes or whether each culture has autonomy. For instance, the
Greenlandic young people would be against being in a cultural ghetto. They would
not like to be isolated from the internet. We think the better way to try and
access it is to try and see what the opportunities are. Not freedoms—whatever
institutions they are, the constitution or formal institutional autonomy for
freedom and the resources for the existing society or culture. Then we have to
distinguish between minority/majority; indigenous/non-indigenous – what it deems
adequate for cultural well-being. We haven’t delved deep into the scale yet.
The indicators for that still have to be found; presence or absence of this and
that possibly with scores assigning best to worse in a table and then the table
can have a final score for the region. Larry will talk about language. We then
investigated with other groups the leftovers; things that are important but not
covered but might be under cultural development, for instance.
We think closeness to nature is a huge bubble under cultural well-being. It’s
not just being healthy, but it is culture. We thought if we can, as we can in
some regions; evaluate the formal and informal economy as a proxy for sharing
and social networks which are so important for living in that community rather
than another it and may be a proxy for closeness to nature itself.
When we spoke with the education group, we recognized that the idea of home
education is not covered. It is too soon for us to say if there are indicators
for that. Those are our reflections.
Language and Cultural Well-Being (Larry K)
(PDF Presentation linked)
Gail started speaking to you about cultural indicators for language in the
arctic. We’re looking at well-being issues for majority language speakers. It’s
important for minority languages to consider the language vitality, the
percentage of indigenous people speaking the language or age of youngest people
using the language. We want to ask if there is official recognition or status
given to indigenous or language. We can’t determine which dialect. But we can
learn if there is status granted to indigenous language in addition to a
majority European language. Is there official recognition of the indigenous
language in the education system? What levels? primary education; secondary
education; post-secondary – is the indigenous language used in schools? Is it
offered to second language learners? What about use of indigenous language in
public institutions – legal proceedings? What about government? What level?
Local, provincial, national? Is there a language commission or body involved
with vocabulary development to meet modern needs for the language? Is the
indigenous language used in media, TV, radio, newspapers? And the rate of
publication of indigenous languages. Language use in society: availability of
indigenous language in the popular culture – secular music. Do you find this
available and practiced: Indigenous language in relation to and medical services
and literature.
Peter S
I am also a member of this group. As you can see, language is clearly at the
center of our attention. We’re aware that cultural well-being cannot be talked
about without addressing the language issues. We will have to see how some of
the other issues that Yvon pointed out shape up. In the overall scheme of things
we are more on the drawing board than some of the other groups. We need a few
more discussions.
Larry H
I want to make an observation about scale. As I was listening to Larry, it seems
to me a lot of those things sound like national scale levels. But language in
the schools would be at the individual school level. I see different scale
levels which is something to be aware of in all of these indicators.
Peter S
Clearly the many issues that Larry brought up in the discussion we had there
were clearly individual and local scales which would be our preference and we
could aggregate from there if necessary.
Larry K
In Alaska a lot of the indigenous language use is at a local level. In Canada it
is often at a territorial level, not national.
Tatiana
My question is about spiritual levels: Did you consider taking into account
sacred sites of indigenous people? RAIPON has taken up identifying and making
maps of sacred sites.
Peter S
In the first presentation to the ASI group – spiritual discussion of has been
part of the cultural continuity group. Spiritual well-being is one of the
leftovers. There is also the fact that we feel overwhelmed by how much we are
supposed to address. I know we used the study on the sacred sites in the chapter
of the AHDR. Not every important component in cultural well-being can be
addressed, but will be discussed in our chapter.
Puju
The fate control group will have to closely tie with the language questions.
Some of the problems we encounter are the language dialect and language use –
standardized uses. It is especially a fate control question; the use of this as
part of that--recognition beyond dialect.
Peter S
Coordination is definitely necessary. In the two domain groups you will be the
two primarily responsible for language issues.
Susie
What did you discuss about indigenous non-indigenous language issues? Is it an
assumption that non-indigenous populations don’t count? Where are they with the
language indicator?
Larry K
We talked about involvement of non-indigenous people with indigenous language.
It didn’t seem like you could assess cultural well being for non-indigenous
languages.
Yvon
When we wrote the chapter on culture and societies, we realized that for
majority languages the rentention rates are 90% and above. That’s different than
when the retention rates are 50% or below.
BOREA Speaker 1
Are these indicators you are developing also from mixed communities where there
are non-natives and natives? I would imagine the schools would speak the
majority language.
Peter S
These indicators are supposed to apply to the arctic as a whole. I think the
cultural well being group will violate this trend.
Yvon
The idea with language and cultural autonomy is to capture what the conditions
are for the majority and the minority populations. If there are the mixed
populations, what are the conditions for the majority and what are the
conditions for the minority to practice it’s own culture.
Andrey
In Russia you could look at how many attend theatres – institution of the
majority – design some indicator of mainstream culture.
Peter S
Proxy here: theatres.
Tatiana
Maybe even not theatre. In reindeer communities we see a lot of people keeping
local museums at their houses. They get different dresses and musical
instruments and they show people coming to the region these museums. They also
have local theatres in their households.
Puju
I think it would be important to show where, even though the local community is
speaking one language, the system is using another language. That would show up
in Greenland with institutions using one language and the community using
another. In the context of fate control, it is important to have this kind of
indicator. What is the language of the institution, the government?
Peter S
Thank you, I think we need to hurry a bit – next is closeness to nature.
Closeness to Nature (Leslie)
(PDF Presentation linked)
Our group is Contact with Nature. That’s our official name. We talked about
other possible names like “close and meaningful relationship with nature”; “the
natural world”; and “belonging with the land”. One of our first challenges was
to figure out what contact with nature meant. But the AHDR did suggest that one
crucial determiner of being in the arctic: Arctic societies are place based
societies – which . . . . get AHDR – into realms of identity, spirituality and
culture our group crosses over other groups as well. This is us leaping into the
unknown.
So, we talked about the concept – “contact with nature” and defining it. It is
still pretty open, I think. We developed 23 indicators of contract with nature
which we will have to lump a little in our chapter. We subjected all 23 to
criteria for evaluating and testing their usefulness as indicators: data
availability; validity; indigenous and non-indigenous; rural/urban; gender. In
the process we came down to four indicators. At this meeting we had great
discussions and have outlined our chapter and our consultation strategy.
I already talked about defining the issue, so I won’t take more time now. Our
relationship to the AHDR: the objective is that we are a follow up to the AHDR
where we are tasked with identifying indicators of sustainable human development
in the arctic. We always said we were the hardest group—we’d probably get
argument from others. We face challenges in this process in our relationship to
other indicators, in the need to find indicators unique to the arctic,
reflecting both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples of the arctic, considering
both rural and urban. Our indicators are to be generalizable, derived from
existing data, and trackable over the long term. Of prime importance is the
policy relevance of these indicators. We will explore these in our chapter.
Our potential indicators are: our overarching, ideal – participation in outdoor
activities. Because we want this to be useful for indigenous and non-indigenous
populations – amount of harvest, consumption of country food. We did come up
with consumption of country food as a possible indicator which we would measure
it on a yes/no basis and then look at what percent of diet is country food etc.
Time on the land we discussed a lot in terms of how to measure. There was more
or less consensus that “nights spent on the land” was sort of the extreme
example of contact with nature. Finally we overlapped with the education domain
thinking about existence and extent of place-based education in the schools.
That data would be easy to get through ministries of education and school
districts. Jack mentioned this may be inversely related to transmission of
knowledge about the traditional world. If schools have programs it may mean
families no longer teach the traditional activities.
We had problems with participation in traditional activities when we subjected
it to testing because it varies by region. But there is excellent SLiCA data.
Jack was very helpful because he set up the SLiCA data in our domains. We have
yet to select a single indicator.
So our chapter will consist of defining the concept; a literature review (this
is a lovely concept and has resonance with southern populations as well as
arctic populations) the process; selection of final indicators; and a conclusion
which will describe our consultation strategy (that does include everyone in
this room; the Permanent Participants of the Arctic Council; the World Reindeer
Association, indigenous research institutes and various research projects –
including BOREAS), and finally our rationale for the indicators chosen. We’ve
shared wonderful stories which will show up in boxes in our chapter.
Peter S
Thank you, Leslie: Questions, comments?
Puju
The traditional use of labour and the modern way of organized diet today, how do
you plan to get that? Have to include work division between men and women.
Leslie
Yes. We talked a lot about that.
Peter
Let’s move on to the next group – material well being.
Material Well Being (Lee)
(PDF Presentation linked)
I don’t have a power point, which is my preference. So, if this is hard to
follow, blame Gail. Last night at about 4:45 we had a discussion of how to
present our group summaries and she said no power point.
We thought about the definition of material well-being and determined it to mean
“some measure of local residents’ command over goods and services”. We focused
on that – it should be time and location specific – small scale. For now we gave
up any sense of trying to find an indicator to try to measure future course of
well being.
As I mentioned the other day, it might be measured by GDP for a nation, but
that’s a problem for small regions. We decided we want to present the story of
an indicator of well being wrapped around the story of the arctic economy so
people will understand some of the strengths and limits and character of the
arctic economy. We were seeking an indicator compatible with the arctic economy.
One characteristic that is important is that the arctic economy can only be
thought of in three parts: money or market; traditional/subsistence part; and
transfer part. Many parts of the arctic goods and services are provided directly
as well as transfer income. The other thing common in the arctic is the large
flows of money out of the region through non-resident labour. Those two sets of
characteristics are important. We talked about the tension in these indicators
between indigenous or tradition-based communities, and settler or
non-tradition-based communities. You might not see a lot of subsistence
production so that tension is something we have to address.
We chose to see if we could come up with 3 measures that would divide each of
these – or define each of these components. We started with personal income; we
would like it on per capita basis—we might take taxes out and adjust for prices;
money delivered to residents. It includes transfer payments. It’s a measure of
the dollar component of material well being;
As an indicator of the traditional component of well-being, we chose the same
measure that the living on the land group chose: harvest per person with weight
category as an indicator – if the weight of harvest goes up, people have greater
command over goods and services.
Finally for the third measure we wanted to look at goods and services from
government directly at low costs—we though about this and decided that since
housing is major component of peoples’ income we could look at that. We would
measure housing quality, location and number of rooms per person or sq feet.
There are lots of government services and goods provided like food and schools.
We talked about the possibility of collapsing the 3 into an index. We talked
about the fact that how these are calculated and what they mean in different
places matters a lot. If we could turn these into a qualitative measure we could
get around some of the data issues.
The chapter would begin with a discussion of the organization of the arctic
economy followed by a definition of material well-being. We would present our
indicators and discuss why we chose those. We would test our indicators to see
if we are measuring three things or really just one thing if they are all
related – then maybe see how well they explain well-being by using the SLiCA
data to look across community differences in people’s perceived well-being and
how they relate to these two things.
The other thing we didn’t talk about in our chapter is to take whatever set of
indicators we come up with and have some discussion about the strengths and
limits of the indicator for telling us what we want to know and the kind of
economy we’re dealing with.
Matt
As many of you know, I like giving Lee a hard time, he’s my department chair. I
was part of this group and I thought they were doing well, so I went to the
Close to Nature group. One of the indicators that we discussed that has dropped
off the table is people – people taking their own initiative to improve their
well being whether by getting a job—fate control self-generated income. I was
wondering – if material well-being is defined in terms of command over goods and
services and fate control is command over institutions; what happens to command
over your own ability to make ends meet? It’s hardest to measure, so what
happens to that?
Lee
I think one of the limits of something like, say personal income, is that people
may choose not to work in the labour market or they may choose to work and have
limited marketable skills. I think focusing on the here and now is what we were
trying to do. As everyone might know is what I like to do is inarticulately
respond to Matt.
Peter S
It clearly raises a larger issue: it is impossible to reflect the full
complexity of the reality no matter how many indicators we come up with. The
question is whether the final product will make enough sense.
Lee
We also talked about the fact that we have we have measures we are pretty sure
we can get hold of. We also talked about what we would like to include in a
perfect set of measures and I think opportunities might go there.
Matt
It’s a basic question about well-being – is it something given to you or do you
have to produce it yourself? I think it is the latter. I think it is more
important that people perceive they have control or can improve their well
being. I couldn’t claim there’s any literature to support me.
Peter
If there are no more comments—education.
Education (Rasmus)
(PDF Presentation linked)
We are a small group of three. We started by going into a lot of different
issues and possible indicators that could be used in connection with the task
we’ve been given. We also saw it as a goal to try to focus on one indicator. So
instead of outlining a lot of issues and then choose, we decided to move quickly
to THE indicator we felt to be the most important. The keywords we focussed on
were: Education for whom? Education for what? Education how? The indicator
should come up with measures of input, output, processes and involvement.
After discussion we decided on the participation and completion of
post-secondary education which comprises three sub-issues: the proportion of a
cohort pursuing post-secondary educational opportunities; the ratio of students
finalizing post-secondary education opportunities; and finally the percent of
students finalizing post-secondary education opportunities being in the
community/municipality/region 10 years after completion of the post-secondary
education.
Of course, such a measure implies the potential of sub-grouping regarding age,
gender, and subpopulations such as minorities, indigenous/non-indigenous, while
it’s still open to other sub-groupings.
If we dig into the sub-questions the rationale in choosing participation in
post-secondary education it:
• Indicates to what extent the students have adequate primary and secondary education qualification
• Indicates to what extent there is an interest among young people to achieve educational goals
• Indicates to what extent the community is promoting education as a means for the future
There are related questions here, for instance, equal opportunities—equity. One
is whether students have equal opportunities and whether students pursue these
opportunities.
Second we look at the ratio of students successfully completing post-secondary
education opportunities. Completion rate is a proxy of the ability to finish a
program; but also a measure of both emphasizing localized access: is it possible
to do this in a setting that fits the cultural and social expectations of the
student.
The third one was about students with completed post secondary education and
whether they are in the municipality or region 10 years after completion. It
relates to the community’s ability to respond to the new requirements and the
community’s commitment to community well-being.
The indicator enables the identification of a number of associated policies
where study of policy documents would be valuable. Do the policies, in
connection with post-secondary education, promote retention of youth? Do the
policies promote gender equality? Do the policies enable involvement of locals
in decisions; are there policies promoting local access; are there policies
enabling infrastructures where surpluses and deficits are balanced?
Although it needs further discussion, a number of issues have been touched on
that relate to other domain groups:
- Closeness to nature
- Connection between local agenda and relevance of programs
- Material well-being
- Connection between local agenda and relevance of programs
- Health/Demographics
- Cohort-characteristics
We looked at the criteria and determined our indicator does well as follows:
• Data availability
– Already available in most regions
• Measurement (ease of measurement)
– Easily measurable
• Internal validity
– High validity
• Affordability
– Very affordable
• Formal/perceived
– Already recognized
• Robustness
– Very robust
• Indigenous/non-indigenous
– Included
• Data sources
– Formal agencies
• Aggregation
– Built in community / municipality /regional / national
• Comprehensiveness
– Covering
• Coherence
– Coherent
• Simplicity
– Simple to collect, simple to disseminate
– Criteria for testing
• Unambiguous
– Yes
• Interest of stakeholders
– Expected high
• Generalizeable
– Yes
Jack
As I got into the SLiCA data, one of the eye openers was the formal degree
programs fit this well—unambiguous and available. When you get into the area of
certificate programs – when you ask people did you take anything after high
school it becomes very foggy as to what you could you count or not count.
Rasmus
We will need some registration or classification. We are not talking about
“higher education”. This can be anything from 2-3 week programs in welding or
whatever and all that contributes to getting qualifications.
Birger
I think it is a great idea to consider all kinds of further education but to be
able to compare between communities over time you will need some kind of
grouping of these because there must be a way to know if you’re talking about an
academic education or mostly 2-week courses. It would open up for differences of
sub-indicators –
Rasmus
You are touching on the important issue of using indicators – you cannot start
making it complex in an indicator. What we have been focusing on is the
willingness of going into additional education whether at one level or another.
It’s not that important – it would be important if you become a doctors whether
there are limited opportunities or some vocational training program. We see this
as an indicator of what communities or regions are dynamic and open for in the
way of new opportunities. I think we see this – these details can be interesting
in some way but for recognition of the dynamics of this simple indicator I think
it’s ok.
Puju
It’s a question of correlation between the education codes and requirement for
application for post secondary education?
Rasmus
By having this measure of how many enter the program it is an indication of how
many received the level of education required to continue. We will learn the
quality indicator if we start subdividing.
Puju
It could be a qualification of the educational system if you match these two.
Rasmus
If we see a divergence between the cohort and the number entering post-secondary
education there is something to focus on and analyze. Then we can ask, is it due
to education that is not adequate or are students’ qualifications not adequate.
There is a lot of information that would be interesting but we need simple,
understandable indicators to reduce the level of complexity.
Ray
One of the considerations is to have an indicator that would address the
intersection designed to serve the needs of an individual and the community and
how they interact. I think this indicator would embrace both elements and give
us the data to analyze and sort where the differentials exist and with
completion rates and so on.
Rasmus
The indicator is intended to indicate if there is anything to look into. If
there is a coherent or similar pattern, we can be sure the system is
functioning. We will look for cases where it is not functioning. We don’t think
the indicator is meant to point to solutions, just to the problems.
Andrey
Why are you focused on postsecondary rather than secondary education? In many
arctic communities even a secondary education is not achieved.
Rasmus
For me, primary and secondary are more or less in the system. It is the system
that controls that, while moving from secondary to postsecondary it is very much
the individual’s determination. We are looking at the interests of the people
living in the arctic. It is their decision whether they want to get
qualifications needed by the community or qualifications that enable them to
move away from the community.
Ray
One of the most instrumental sets of initiatives across arctic has been
indigenous and non-indigenous locally-serving post-secondary education for the
locals. We miss employment and cultural development in the community if we focus
on secondary education data. If we get it to the post-secondary level we also
encompass community aspirations.
Boreas Speaker 1
It seems you are focusing on formal education. I wonder if there was space for
informal education. It’s not helpful for indicators, but skill development—for
example in Chukotka native people had secondary education but have lost much of
their native skills and with individual and community needs, is there space for
non-formal education?
Rasmus
I think it is included in cultural viability and closeness to nature and I think
that is where it belongs. We are dealing with formal education.
Jan-Henry
Ray and I have been discussing changing the name of the group because the name
is education—it is understood as being the formal thing, but we will be focusing
on in our chapter as Knowledge and we think post-secondary nomenclature will
reflect many of the things that go into knowledge production; utilization;
knowledge transfer. If we have the opportunity, I would like to change the name
to Education/Knowledge.
Larry H
I appreciate that you guys did a lot of thinking about operationalizing. In
register societies you can access information about retention of youth and youth
moving to higher education, but how do you plan to get this data in Alaska,
Canada or Russia?
Rasmus
I can only speak for Scandinavia and Greenland we need to look into how to do
it.
Ray
The Alaska Native Policy Center has taken an active role in gathering data on a
whole range of issues that come close to what we’re talking about here, so I
think we’ll be able to gather that data in Alaska.
Birger
I don’t know how much time we have here about education/knowledge – but
including knowledge in the name might make it more blurred. You can discuss
whether they belong together – but if you keep education in the name. . . .
Peter S
This will be a general issue in all the domains – all these complexities will
need addressed in the 25-page a narrative chapters, then focusing in on the
limited selected indicators.
Missed some of knowledge discussion
Puju
It is the question of brain drain. How do we keep them back – education can very
easily become the drain.
Yvon
The other day, in one of the Greenlandic papers there was a story about “well it
may cost us a lot, but it might be good to train locals to do administration”.
Maybe they should educate local people rather than train outsiders!
Health and Demography (Larry H)
(PDF Presentation linked)
Since this was a successful theme the first day I thought I’d stick with it:
“you can’t always get what you want”
We talked about what sort of indicators we need. We lost Peter B after the first
day so we gave him writing assignments on health – so demographics is discussed
more here. Almost every one of the indicators the rest of you come up with will
have to be calculated in terms of part of the population – so these will go into
almost every indicator we’ve talked about. If we had information on population
by year, by year and place/scale, by year, place/scale age and sex, and by year,
place/scale, age, sex and identity, there’s a lot of rich information that can
be extracted there.
Population changes are all interesting and important social indicators and they
are important for understanding the place. We may want specific things like
birth rate for mothers under 19 years old. Etc. Deaths are also interesting. We
need number of deaths, by year, place, scale. You calculate things like
mortality, accidental death rates, all sorts of things.
The way we’ve written this slide (Slide 2), the basic data are in black, derived
indicators are in red. If we had to choose a single indicator (of course we want
them all) we thought net migration would be the single one we would choose—that
may connect most closely with the BOREAS workshop to follow.
We talked about different sources of information on health – surveys can get at
health-related behaviours and subjective measures of health and well-being. It’s
partly relative to who you’re comparing yourself to.
In the case of all indicators we discussed, we understood we need to know
context. A physician is a different kind of job in one country from another. You
need local context for all these indicators. There are issues about language,
culture, access, knowledge and how communication goes between residents and
health care professionals.
We want to put out our thoughts that demography is fundamental to all aspects of
society. When you get to that point you can’t take the data for granted. Even a
number for a population of a place, the number of youth under 19, who are
indigenous. In 1999 it becomes trickier.
In our chapter we would refer to and expand on the AHDR chapter on demographics
and health. It has been suggested we should say something on some social
problems identifiable as health issues.
Next I want to talk about what to do with an indicator when you have it. What
about longitudinal data? You need a lot of years to say something.
It’s only when you see the long term series that you can see the real trend. You
can’t find a trend from 2, 3 or 4 points. Comparisons among places. These are
birth rates for 23 Alaska regions on the left and 19 Greenland municipalities on
the right. There is much more variation within Alaska than between Greenland and
Alaska. Things you can define for one place are harder to get for 20, 200 or
2000. I keep bringing up problem of scale. Even something as simple as time
series of population it is a big project to collect those data.
Birger
A couple areas that we had taken up that are usually clustered are social
problems. Social problems like violence and domestic violence are important
indicators of well-being. If they change, there would be no question that it was
positive if there was less domestic violence. Often well being is clustered by
health.
Yvon
We discussed the issue of not too bad data on some aspects of violence like
violent death and suicide. We wondered if they have any meaning in terms of
cultural well-being. The AHDR said highlight success stories and please don’t
talk about the negative things. However, when the rate of suicide diminishes, it
is a success story. We shouldn’t hide that.
Reading some almost science fiction for the arctic for the next decade there is
the possibility the climate will be so mild you can do gardening and
possibilities that there will be a major influx of population in the arctic.
What is now an indicator of good things might be a doom for some people like
indigenous people who will be overwhelmed.
Larry
If you develop an oil well, there will be another completely different story.
Andrey
Are you measuring the system or the health of the community? If you’re measuring
the health and demography—wouldn’t infant mortality talk about the health of the
community and the health system both?