inuissues

The blog was still alive

2009-02-20T02:13:00.000-08:00

For a moment there I thought I had a thing going. But the promise was more than I could fulfill, and so the blog has been put to sleep for a while. I'll try and spread the word to anyone interested if/when I get back to the inuissues. Sorry.

_mads

The blog is still alive

2009-02-01T12:37:00.000-08:00

The blog lives on, but Winter activities have had the upper hand on our schedule lately. However, I am planning an interview with the local leader of a music school with a social twist. Also in the pipe is (hopefully) an interview with maybe the only Greenlandic electronica artist.

Come back for more soon.

Thanks.
_m

The (non-)debate on the Greenlandic Self Rule

2009-01-20T16:58:00.000-08:00

A guy named Tench Coxe took part in debating the American Constitution in September 1787. He wrote:
"It is impossible for an honest and feeling mind, of any nation or country whatever, to be insensible to the present circumstances of America. Were I an East Indian, or a Turk, I should consider this singular situation of a part of my fellow creatures, as most curious and interesting. Intimately connected with the country, as a citizen of the Union, I confess it entirely engrosses my mind and feelings."

The curious and the interesting. The engrossing of mind and feelings. Every person's profound interest in bringing about a real change.

Democracy as an action, not an institution. Democracy as a need for sharing through deliberation and sensitivity.

But why, then, would Hans Enoksen, the leader of the Greenlandic Home Rule, talk about the new Self Rule and only talk about it through the eyes of the state? Why address a nation in a televised speech on January 1. when all that was said dealt with fortified institutions and fermented culture-concepts?

(Maybe because that's how leaders of countries have led themselves to believe that they should speak, and therefore the practice is already discursive in its structuration of a mind which then produces state-structuring speech?).

There he was, talking about institutions of culture, the new and larger municipal entities, the church, the public administration, the national language, the state-produced wonders of more and better education, the national board for working-out-what-might-be-wrong-with-the-fishing-industry, etc.

And all of it eloquently delivered inside the failsafe emo-identity package of Self Rule and wrapped in the comforting prospects of a great future. Oh yes, Mr. Enoksen knows how to fit everything inside the self-conscious wave of identity politics.

Meanwhile members of his house of representatives were breaking every moral code of free and open voting procedures by casting votes for absentees, essentially voting two or more times on bills being proposed. Like here, and here.

Strange this thing, modern democracy. Adhering as it does to a people-de-powered rule through representation, and even stranger in this country, with many people believing that most politicians, once elected, should be left in peace to do their job. But what excactly is their job if not to debate political issues openly, publicly and with the voters instead of only with each other? Clearly, leaving them to "do their job" in parliament just makes them think that they have an indisputable right to act according to their own moral standards and their own interests.

Anyway. This amazingly politicized little blog-post of mine merely wants to remind anyone interested in political debate - or general discussions on topics related to sociality - that democracies dont by law become increasingly democratic as the years go by. There is no inherent evolution of the democratic mindset built into a system based on representational politics. On the contrary, there is the ever present risk of a slow disintegration of public debate when deliberation is forgotten and the politics of Politics become the norm.

Therefore I just want to remind myself and anyone who made it this far in my rambling text that Self Rule will not automatically generate anything apart from more of the so-called identity, and that it might even unintentionally create "all the wretchedness and wickedness of an aristocracy, without a single particle of its dignity".

So don't get out there and vote. Get out there and talk.

Itsumarlo Parlo - part two

2009-01-11T13:59:00.000-08:00

I'm back with two of two interview films with the guys behind a movie made in the true spirit of people powered changes. "Tikeq Iterleq Mikileraq Eqeqqoq" is a movie which takes place in Sisimiut, it is a fully home grown production, and here is the sceond installment of what they told me about themselves and the project:

Itsumarlo Parlo interview - part one

2009-01-04T13:28:00.000-08:00

This is part one of two interview films with the guys behind a movie made in the true spirit of people powered changes. "Tikeq Iterleq Mikileraq Eqeqqoq" is a movie which takes place in Sisimiut, it is a fully home grown production, and here is what they told me about themselves and the project:

Please excuse the fact that the spoken language is Danish (the subtitles are in English). My Greenlandic is more than far from sufficient for doing interviews of any kind. (Sorry).

Click here to see the movie trailer.

Thanks to Jakub Christensen Medonos for inspiration and networking. Check out his blog here.

2009 - more issues coming up

2009-01-02T14:51:00.000-08:00

After a few weeks of holiday-related blogging-silence I am planning another post. This one is an interview with the four filmstars from the recently released (local) box office hit: "Tikeq Qiterleq Mikileraq Eqeqqoq". Interview is scheduled for Saturday January 3rd. Expect first part of the video to be posted early next week. Check out Jakub's blog post on this movie - including a movie trailer HERE.

Democratic Sustainability - Part 2

2008-12-18T06:59:00.000-08:00

This post returns to continue the story of changing Arctic energy consumption patterns from below by retrofitting houses with insulation and sustainable energy appliances.

The basics of the Democratic Sustainability Project – Lighthouse 2.0 are described in my November 16 post. Here I will give a brief overview of what happened when the analysis group met in Sarfannguit to look at the house.

Analysing the state of the Lighthouse - or B872 as it is so aptly named by the standards of the Greenlandic building system - was an important milestone in creating a baseline for developing an actual manual for energysaving insulation of existing houses. If the house is to slowly transform into a showcase for energy- and money-saving insulation and low energy installations, we need a proper understanding of the place, the building, and the surroundings. That is why a group of house analysts met up in Sarfannguit on December 3.

We were there to assess what could be done to the house, and we were there to spend a day networking within the group and hopefully also with more of the villagers than Piitaaraq Fleischer from the local Municipal Office and Anda Berthelsen, the local Settlement Council chairman, both of whom were a part of the analysis group.

The rest of the analysis group consisted of engineer and carpenter Poul Poulsen from PPConsult in Denmark, the Czech Ph.D. student Petra Vladykova who is working on a project about passive houses for the Arctic, building engineer Jørn Thomsen from the Sisimiut branch of Rambøll, and a carpenter - Carsten Lind - with many years of local experience. Furthermore the national housing company INI A/S had asked to bring Berit Frydendahl, a journalist, along for the trip, which we happily accepted, and the final member of the group was Mads Pihl, the project coordinator from Sisimiut Municipality.

A couple of preliminary meetings had gone before the actual field day, and therefore the group had had a chance to share their initial ideas with each other before the trip. Also, blueprints, thermal images, and impressions from former inhabitants had been discussed over cake and coffee at Rambøll's office the day before heading for Sarfannguit.

Sirius, the Really Rather Fast and Luxurious Boat, and its Captain, Michael, took Poul, Petra, Jørn, Carsten, Berit, and me through the fiord Amerloq and Eastwards to Sarfannguit where we met up with Piitaaraq and Anda. And Immediately we headed for the house where Poul was appointed team leader. The group then spent the rest of the morning untill 1 PM looking at the different parts of the house, going through insulation, vapor screens, wind screens, basement, foundation, etc. At lunchtime Piitaaraqs wife Charlotte served us the most amazing reindeer suaasat (a soup with reindeer meat) and later a layered cake and coffee. Thus replenished the group went back to work while I opened the community house to the public, putting up a few visualizations of the project idea and scope.

Later the group met at the community house for some socializing before departure at 4:30 PM. Even if the turnout for the open house session could be counted on one hand (in a settlement of 120 people) - hopefully due to the happy fact that there is currently full employment amond the adult population, and mainly because of good fishing and many hands needed at the small fish factory - the day still showed that we are working towards a common goal in the project, and that the goal of insulating one house while using local labour for the actual carpenter work in the Summer of 2009 is commonly believed to help villagers develop new skills for retrofitting their own houses in the longer run.

As we left Sarfannguit, Anda, who is also a teacher at the local school, promised to talk to the pupils about the project and to have them distribute a small project information leaflet which we had brought along for the open house session. That way all households in the settlement would get a chance to learn more about what we hope to achieve with the project. Anda's involvement promises to be an important factor in grounding the project locally, and we hope to come back soon and work at more ways of involving the locals, since this project has no raison d'être if it is not a thoroughly cooporative effort.

And so the day of the analysis trip ended with promises of more good work. The boat took the non-resident part of the group from Sarfannguit and back to Sisimiut, while we discussed the possible contents of the analyses report with Poul and Petra who will write the actual report. Once the report is done in Danish we will translate it to Greenlandic and English and publish here at the site for everyone to learn from and comment on.

The report will also be the backbone of the planning and execution stages of Phase II which will kick off in the Winter and Spring of 2009 as we prepare to assemble a group of workers to do the actual re-insulation of the house in the Summer of 2009. And from there it is all about installing low-energy and sustainable energy aplliances to see how they work in the rather testing Arctic climates at 67 degrees north.

Don't forget that the project process is documented and files are posted on the website: http://sites.google.com/site/sarfannguit

Humans and homes

2008-12-07T12:37:00.000-08:00

Is there a solution to the problems with public housing in the Arctic? This blog post offers no quick fixes, but merely tries to highlight different perspectives on current issues and pointing anyone interested to researchers with important perspectives on housing (in)security.

A common problem with no solution
For five months of 2008 we had no heating in our apartment. Fortunately the months spanned April to September, and you would think that we hardly needed heating in Spring and Summer, and therefore we managed just fine. But on the rocky outcrop of town where we live, our nearest neighbor is the sea and the winds coming off the Davis Strait. And since April is not really Spring yet and September is the month of the first Autumn snows, on most days we felt the force of the Arctic pushing through windows and ventilation shafts.

For five months we made phone calls, handed in our apartment keys to the building administrator, had visits from plumbers and plumbers' apprentices, made more phone calls, had more visits, and were given several parallel, conflicting, and more or less plausible explanations to why we had to pay for heating that never reached us.

Meanwhile our place grew colder and colder, and it was not till late September when we passed the frontier of phone ladies and building inspectors that we eventually reached a guy high up in the administration of the housing company who managed to work up enough energy to get the elaborate system of phone lines reaching the wrong people to finally reach the right people. And by a stupidly easy maneuver, which anyone can do, and done from inside our own apartment by a plumber, but which you need to know about in order to ever know is possible, the heat was back on.

The problem was never the system bringing heat through the pipes (we just couldn't release built-up air pressure in the pipes exiting the building). The problem existed and exists in the system of public housing where inhabitants are far removed from the maintenance and renovation of their rental apartments. Instead they depend on a national administrational company which is over-burdened, out-dated, and which fully depends on funding from the Home Rule which by 2008 had run up a 2.7 billion kroner (461 million US dollar) maintenance backlog.

When big trouble multiplies
Countrywide there are 9517 tenancies – both apartments and houses – and if you split the backlog evenly on these tenancies youy end up with a 283.000 Danish kroner (48.000 US dollar) maintenance budget deficit on each and every apartment and house owned and administrated by the Home Rule and the municipalities. That sum is just about the average annual household income in Greenland. And the problem here in Greenland seems to have pan-Arctic siblings.

On December 5, 2008 the Nunatsiaq News in Nunavut told the following story:”The number of Inuit living in housing needing repair totalled 28 per cent across Canada, four times the rate for non-aboriginals.
Within Inuit Nunaat, 31 per cent of Inuit lived in damaged housing, a proportion that's grown 19 per cent in 1996. The percentage of Inuit living in damaged housing ranged from 46 per cent in Nunavik to a low of 26 per cent in Nunavut.” (link)

At least people had homes. Not so for more and more people in certain Nunavik communities, if you are to believe CBC News Canada, who on May 27, 2008 wrote about the village of Puvirnituk on the Eastern shore of Hudson Bay:

”Puvirnituk is gripped by a housing shortage that residents say fuels violence, substance abuse and death in the tiny Inuit village in Nunavik — and is driving many to lives on the streets in Montreal. [...]
Many end up fleeing to Montreal with the hopes of finding better housing — only to end up living, and dying, on the streets.Social services workers in Puvirnituk say they're frustrated with the province's response to the crisis but the government says it faces a daunting and expensive challenge to build more northern homes.” (link)

And on August 21, 2006 the National Greenlandic Radio (KNR) webpage could tell of massive waiting lists for housing with the capital Nuuk and the second- and third-largest towns of Sisimiut and Ilulissat topping the list. 7500 people waited for an ordinary rental apartment or house, a figure which has hardly changed since according to the newspaper Sermitsiaq in an article in October 2008 (link). 7500 people. That is more than 13% of the population lining up for a new home. And here you only count people on public waiting lists. The ones with the money and the time build their own homes.

Housing and human security
Some might argue that people in the North are too dependent on public authorities to provide housing, and that this has come so far that people now expect to be provided housing be the municipality or state. Others might say that a long history of making people dependent through ingenious housing schemes and elaborate bureaucratic structures - while not making sure that the public housing was maintained on even the most basic level - has led to a serious crisis in the current state of housing in many Arctic regions. But whatever you say, whatever you believe, there are still thousands of people just in Greenland and across Arctic Canada whose standards of living are challenged by dilapidated apartment blocks and run down settlement houses.

Curiously enough the Home Rule of Greenland does not understand why a plan to sell some of the rental apartments and houses to the tenants in 2008 only produced 6 sales out of 7.500 possible. Could it be that buying an already worn-down apartment is not that appealing to own? Could it also be that buying your own apartment still means that you depend on the other tenants in the building to treat the rest of the block with care, but you know that they don't since the place is already in need of immediate attention and maintenance (link)? And is it possible that many people could never afford their own apartment or house, and especially not since it might need a serious renovation to be brought up to a proper standard?

Possibly.

But I don't think the problem is just of a technical or financial kind. However, I know next to nothing about the social sides of the problems with housing. What I think I know is that it is very much a matter of human security how we live and how our dwellings create a space for us to feel safe inside. However, dwellings probably only make homes when they matter, make sense, are imbued with meaning to become meaningful spaces – or places, if you will. In such a light I think that examples in an article from Iqaluit, where tenants take part in slowly but activelty destoying their own social and public housing is an important social signal or even a flashing red light (link).

Shelters and homes
The issue, then, is not just about having a roof over your head. It actually does matter to even the people of the North what kind of roof it is, and what that roof means to the inhabitants. True, homelessness must be addressed immediately, and should probably be the prime concern of more town and city administrations, but also the kinds of homes and the way we have access to housing affects how we dwell in them.

Going back to the heating problem in my apartment the main issue for us was not that we could not pay for a plumber to do a proper job (even if that may be the problem for others), but the issue was: We were not supposed to. There is a system in place for doing that. You call them. They fix it. You're renting the place, and if the problem is not your fault, you don't pay. Pretty simple. Or maybe not.

Since the housing company in Greenland is already on a tight budget and since the maintenance backlog is only groing bigger by the year, the company naturally has to prioritize on an even tighter plan than ever before. This means a stressful environment for people employed to deal with any issue such as our lack of proper heating – fewer hands have to deal with ever more run down buildings on an increasingly tight budget with a need for immediate maintenance creating a hole of supernatural proportions.

Talk about housing security.

Like when the entire end of a huge apartment building in the town of Maniitsoq on the Greenlandic West coast is in danger of collapsing and large wall panels come off and tumble down onto a trafficked street. And they expect people to care about their buildings all the while when the buildings are not actually theirs?

Learn from the pros
I have no insights to bring to this issue. And I have made no attempt at really analyzing anything. I merely have an interest in the subject. That is why I'd rather want to direct your attention to a group of people who I met while attending a conference on Arctic Social Sciences in Nuuk in August 2008.

Ph.D. From McGill university in Montreal, Julia Christensen Kereliuk, deals with ”the emergence of homelessness and housing insecurity in the Northwest Territories”. Her studies of the relations between factors of housing insecurities like housing shortages, housing policies, inaffordability, poor housing quality, trauma and mental health, violence, addictions, etc., really opened my mind to the interconnectedness of the social situation of individuals and families, and the state of their current housing. Check out her webpage here.

But closely related to this work is the work of Gunhild Hoogensen, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Tromsø in Norway, who runs a project on the impact of oil and gas activity on peoples in the Arctic (the GAPS project). And while you're there you should also take som time to check out the many other researchers and their work affiliated with the GAPS project (see researchers here).

And that's about it this time. I have no closing statement. And I know this post went in a few different directions. But I hope that I somehow made sense. The people doing the real work telling the stories I only hinted at here can be found in the links above.

Thanks for reading the blog.
Cheers! _M

Planning to let people do the planning

2008-11-24T13:27:00.001-08:00

This blog post deals with the potential benefits of using participatory approaches to ground democratic decisions in the voices and choices of a local population.

Politics from the ground up

Okay, here it is, the (apparently) inevitable U.S.-election related blog post which hails the from-the-ground approach of the Obama campaign.

But then again, that's about as much as this post is directly related to the election of Barack Obama.

All I really want to do is draw attention to the people power in the Obama campaign while I at the same time state my own personal interest in the election of a president who really seems rather different from the old-school politicians in charge of many a country around the world.

Actually, in using the Obama factor as a reference point I merely wanted to point to one specific point which was made again and again during the final days of televised analyses, but which still did not ring less true at the end: This presidency has the potential to inspire a new wave of human action which will travel well beyond the reach of the American administration.

And that is the issue this time for the blog: How politics and public administration based on participatory approaches could potentially help bridge the gap between available resources and practical solutions offered in the everyday practice of Arctic politics.

Voices and Choices

My thoughts on this was propelled along by the description of presidential-election-unrelated events in the U.S., where a massive undertaking to reshape and revitalize the development of North Eastern Ohio has been taken from the corridors of the Cities and Counties and brought out into full public debate. It is a case of people powered planning.

People from all backgrounds in the local communities were asked to take part in a large-scale "regional town meeting" in which focus was on discussions rather than speeches, expert panels, and question-and-answer sessions (the image here shows a puclic meeting in typical expert-panel style, when the aluinum company Alcoa held meetings in Greenland in the Fall of 2007). An organization called Voices & Choices (which is part of a larger initiative called AmericaSpeaks) helped the process take shape and meet the goal, which essentially was to involve the local population in a decision that would have an impact on the future of the region as a whole.

But maybe it would be better to let the organizers themselves describe the point of the operation:

"Each person here today represents, and is drawn from, the diversity of the Northeast Ohio region. You will participate in roundtable discussions (10-12 people per table), deliberating in depth about your vision for a better place, what regionalism means to you, and what you perceive as the greatest challenges we face in Northeast Ohio.

You will have an easy-to-use voting keypad and each table discussion will be supported by a trained volunteer facilitator to guide your discussions. The ideas that come from your table's discussions will be submitted to a central area where a team will work to compile results for the entire room.Before the end of the day, results from the meeting will be compiled into a report, which will be distributed to participants as they leave. Decision makers will actively participate in the meeting by taking part in table discussions, observing the process, and responding to citizen input at the end of the meeting.

The region's strengths and challenges identified by people like yourself, will be shared back with others through the media, more group discussions with other citizens and leaders, and via the Voices & Choices website. We want as many people as possible to have the opportunity to weigh-in on how we chart our future.

The first step in developing an agenda to revitalize Northeast Ohio's economy will be to create a shared vision for the future. We must then identify the most important challenges that need to be addressed in order to reach that vision. Once we have identified these challenges, we can consider our options for overcoming them and we can prioritize actions to move forward. An important first step for this discussion will be to look at the current conditions of the region. Voices & Choices has divided the issues facing Northeast Ohio into the following framework:

• Economic Growth & Employment

• Education & Skills

• Quality of Life & Place

• Equity & Fairness

• Cooperation & Governance

These categories are not meant to be exhaustive or to suggest that we ignore how issues are related to one another across categories. Rather, they are intended to encourage us to think about the broad diversity of issues that should be considered in setting an economic agenda for the future." (source)

Could this happen in your community?

Even with an effort much smaller than the one of such massive magnitude as in Ohio, I believe a local government, a municipal administration or even a settlement council could drum up a sincere interest in the development of planned changes.

But why not leave it up to the planning professionals, the engineers, the politicians, and the people in the administrational offices?

Well, I think a much more important question qould be: Why leave it up to them?

Making transformative decisions which influence the use and shape of the lived-in land- and socioscapes around us should not be reduced to a small group of people – even if some of them are elected officials. The representative democracy still needs to not only hear people, but to actively engage into a conversation with people. The Ohio case shows that, when properly involved, everyone participating, no matter what their background, take part, share ideas, listen to each other, and together they come up with a solution much closer to a common core of interests than if a smaller group of hired professionals and politicians had to do the job alone.

Representational democracy needs knowledge. It needs grounding in actual shared interests. And the ones representing others need to remember that representation is just that and nothing more. It is not a blank cheque for party politics, corridor compromises, or physical and social planning done behind closed office doors.

The worry, I think, is not so much that the people in charge are completely unwilling to perform an operation more or less akin to the one in Ohio. And it is not because I believe that this could come solely from something like an NGO either. I think that this has to be a joint venture – and one which can certainly only work if it gets "official" support, since the final decisions always end up going through the local City Council or Parliament, etc.

Who should be doing this?

Maybe the problem that keeps these initiaves at bay boils down to the fact there is hardly anyone who can perform the conjuring trick of participatory planning at the moment, because there is lack of people with enough time to develop do it locally and practically, and especially because there is such a constant lack of freed-up intellectual resources available, that no one ever has the time to do anything but what is part of their ordinary work.

What this does is to potentially leave all of us with a democratic deficit, because decisions will continue to be made in the local council or in the national parliament, and these decisions all have the potential to affect whole populations or entire local communities. So I suggest that we try, even if it is difficult. And I suggest that we use whatever resources are available. The power of Wikipedia, Facebook, and microfinance did not just happen. People made it happen.

Therefore, the proposition is simple: To introduce governmental institutions and politicians to the idea of community particpation in planning and decision making, thereby taking a few first steps that could help bring a methodological change to the approach of good governance in the Arctic. And by all means, at least here in Greenland we need the change, and we need to engage every mind we have, because there is so few of us, so many issues to deal with, and such few people officially employed to deal with them.

Pushing the issue in Sisimiut, Greenland

In my own municipality I hope that the administration will listen to a proposal for involving a part of the population in the future planning process of how we, as a public and as a population, will have access to the hunting and fishing grounds around us, how and where we can enter the mountains on dog sleds and snowmobiles, where we want industry – and if we even want large scale industry, what areas should be kept free of backcountry development and where we see a need for improving existing infrastructure, but also how we want to educate the children, what environmental ethics we will live by, how we want to deal with the problems of poor housing, and in general where we see our local society going in the years ahead of us.

These are all issues about which a lot of people will be able to form qualified opinions. And the interesting thing is that the meeting of many – a great many – minds has proved to be a powerful democratic and highly transparent tool in shaping the course of a community.

This is the bottom line of using you, me, and everybody else in the planning process: Given the right forum for open-ended discussions, continuous feed-back from other participating groups, and a proper amount of background knowledge, we are able to find a way to an informed position which reflects a great many more positions and interests than ordinary parliamentary democratic solutions usual provide.

Take action now – or settle for nothing later?

What I think is really interesting is how people become involved or are invited to participate in democratic action around the Arctic, and since my own personal experience here in Greenland is that we often end up with the standard expert speeches followed by question-and answer sessions when we hold public meetings, there is still a lot to be learned.

Does anyone out there have experiences to share? Have you run a particpatory work shop designed to provide input for political decisions? Are you involved in non-governmental work which seeks solutions based on people powered deliberation and decision making? What else?

And how does it work in the Arctic – with the natural obstacles in the landscape, the small populations, the different languages?

Any and all suggestions, references, and experiences are most welcome – and the transparency of the knowledge will only make it easier for others to produce transparent solutions.

After all, there is hope for a new way of doing politics. We just need to do it ourselves

Democratic Sustainability

2008-11-16T08:37:00.000-08:00

A people-powered project for sustainable energy development

Arctic technologies in the making

It was March 2008 and it was a sunny Sunday at the peak of Winter. There was a choice between spending the day in the backcountry with snowmobiles and snowshoes or spending the day in an auditorium at the local building and construction school in Sisimiut.

To most people in Sisimiut this choice was clear, and it would have been for me as well

if the activities in the auditorium had not been a conference on sustainable energy in the Arctic. So I opted for the darkened room and the power point presentations only to find myself in the throes of brilliant minds with great solutions for sustainable Arctic technologies.

Speaker upon speaker talked about wind turbine powered hydrogen energy, hydropower, compost toilets, creating heat from burning fish waste products, etc. Still, most of the results were carefully presented as preliminary and in need of further testing, especially to fit with the Arctic climate. We need to back into the field, was the common conclusion from most papers delivered.

Fine, I thought, science needs data, and technologies need to be pushed towards better standards. But what if I want a solar panel on my own roof, or a small wind turbine on the hill top in my settlement? How do I do that? And does it work?

I decided to ask the principal from the school in the settlement of Sarfannguit, 40 kilometers East of Sisimiut where the Danish Technical University (DTU) and the Department for Arctic Technologies (Artek) have been running a so-called Lighthouse Project. From what I understood, the project was all about testing technologies in the wild, and the principal, Jakob, was the local contact person for the project.

Over the phone Jakob confirmed that Artek had done extensive local research, but to the disappointment of the people in the settlement nothing much had come out of it apart from more measurements, a lot of scientific reports, and several visits by students and teachers who would usually show up over the day and disappear again with their results.

”We need something more tangible to happen here”, Jakob said, ”like a wind turbine or something else which can help us move towards local energy production and less reliance on diesel fuels. People are getting tired of being studied without getting anything in return”.

The teacher's residence

For a while after the conversation with Jakob I had to forget about sustainable energy, since my office at the municipal administration where, among other things, I work with local development projects, got bogged down in a mountain of day to day assignments.

But one of the assignments which happened to land on my desk was about a house in Sarfannguit, which was inhabited by a teacher emplyoed at the school where Jakob was the principal. The teacher's house was in such poor shape that it could not be heated to more than 3,4 degrees celsius (about 38 degrees fahrenheit) during the winter. There were cracks around windows and along the beadings where wind and snow came through. And after a few years of this without help from the municipality – which owns the house – or from the housing company INI A/S – which has to make sure the house is maintained, the family had had enough and had decided to move to Sisimiut.

I called Jakob to get him to confirm this miserable state of the house, which he did, while adding that the house was basically uninhabitable and something had to done.

The bureaucratic reply to this was to propose a full renovation, and the technical department at the municpality put the probable costs around 1 million Danish kroner (roughly 200.000 US Dollars), which meant that in principle the house would not be renovated but instead end up vacated and left cold till someone struck gold.

Back to doing things that can be done

The conference. The many available technologies. The local interest in Sarfannguit for sustainable development. The uninhabitable teacher's residence which was an important house for the local community.

The pieces somehow came together.

Jakob from Sarfannguit, David Pointing from Risø in Denmark, and I came up with the idea of simply using the now empty teacher's residence as a local test house for sustainable technologies, beginning with a retro-fitting of the house with proper insulation, done as cheaply and still as energy friendly as possible. Only the necessary and vital energy improving things could be done, since we had to try and match the budget on a renovation that had to be cost-friendly to the locals so they in the future could renovate their own houses with new and improved energy saving materials and standards.

And this last part pointed to something important: The project had to rely on people from Sarfannguit to take part in the entire process, making them abe to continue insulating and renovating other settlement houses in need once the first house had been completed.

We settled on an idea that proposed to make the house into an open playground for scientists to get hands-on experience with small-scalle, consumer-oriented appliances. Meanwhile a family was to move in after the insulation was completed and live with and test the installed appliances in order to fit them with the specific needs in the Arctic. And the house was to be open for all visitors to come and experience what a changing energy consumption pattern might do to their own energy bill in an environment where diesel fules are the staple of stove diets, and prices on fossil fuels are only beginning a climb where we do not know the end of the hill.

Thus, the Democratic Sustainability project was born. And we decided to call the house ”the Lighthouse 2.0” to honor the original Artek Lighthouse project but with the 2.0 added to show that this was a community based, open-source inspired collaboration of locals, scientists, the municipal sector, and the private sector.

But we also call this house the Lighthouse because it is supposed to shine a light on a future that can be made brighter, cleaner and more affordable with the help of human initiatives.

Democratic Sustainability – Lighthouse 2.0

The Democratic Sustainability project seeks practical and accessible solutions for improving energy use in existing Arctic houses, using the settlement of Sarfannguit in Sisimiut Municipality, Greenland as a test-site.

At the outset we asked ourselves the question: How do we create sustainable energy solutions that fit with the needs of local communities in the Arctic?

A first and important step is to actually assess and describe the local needs. That is why the project is based on a close co-operation between the population of Sarfannguit and a group of project partners including the local government level in Sisimiut Municipality, the national energy company Nukissiorfiit, the national housing company INI, the University Centre for Arctic Technologies in Sisimiut, and the Innovation Centre in Sisimiut.

And more partners are invited to see the potentials for developing and testing technologies in practice.

Before anything can be done to implement practical and user-friendly sustainable energy applications in people’s everyday lives, the technologies need to be proven in the Arctic climate. And in order to do so, a test-site is needed.

We found this test-site by zooming in on one of the most common typehouses in the Greenlandic housing stock, because we want to make it a showcase for small scale consumer oriented sustainable technologies, which are then further developed while a family inhabits the house.

The test-house in the settlement of Sarfannguit will over time show how focused improvements can pay off for local residents, while at the same time helping to test and develop sustainable energy technologies with an Arctic twist. Therefore, the house will also be run as living and public exhibition of the life of the inhabitants, and how the technologies and improvements affect their lives.

Especially the population in the smaller settlements live in poorly insulated typehouses, and these are also the communities – far away from large scale energy supplies – that feel the direct impact of rising prices on fossil fuels for heating, electricity, transportation and industry.

The long-term goal is to improve the standards of housing, help reduce the use of fossil fuels and change the patterns of energy consumption, fit sustainable energy solutions into existing and new houses, and to spread knowledge and skills all across the Arctic.

But we begin with one house in one community, improving and retrofitting a Lighthouse with the technologies of the future, thereby moving step-by-step towards a more democratic sustainable development.

Follow the progress of the project here: http://sites.google.com/site/sarfannguit

I will also post more project related material here on the blog later on

Thanks for reading this.

_Mads

The Settlement Service

2008-11-08T15:09:00.000-08:00

Thoughts on a people oriented public sector

Ten thousand people and all this space between them
We have come to Maniitsoq.
We are a delegation of municipal employees and settlement politicians. We flew down along the coast a couple of hundred kilometers this morning. It was a bumpy ride in a sturdy little Dash 7 aptly named Sululik (”with wings”), and now we're here to spend the weekend on a Settlement Conference.

The sea is often rough this time of year and the break of waves on a rocky coastline reminds me of the island in the Baltic Sea where I grew up. But when you look out of the window of an aeroplane and down on the Greenlandic West coast you will not see the towns and villages of Europe or North America. You will mostly just see the rugged land, the archipelago that opens up to the Davis Strait or the fiords that stretch inland to the Ice Cap. Such are many administrational units of the Arctic: Geographically vast and sparsely populated. This is where we provide public sector services, balance budgets between travel expenses and social security, run a democratic structure, and generally try to make things work.

Can nothing more be done?
We are in Maniitsoq to present the outcome of a municipal merger. The actual merger itself is a bit like making one unit from the landmasses of Denmark and Ireland but without all the poeple. To some that just means more of the nice open spaces within a somewhat larger administrational unit of roughly 10.000 people. To others it means a governmental headache, since 10.000 people are still 10.000 people. Each and every person is a living, breathing, thinking human being more or less involved with or caught up in one of these strange things going by names such as municipalities, counties, countries, or unions.

15% of the people will from January 1 live in the settlements of the new Qeqqata Municipality. Now. That might just be ”tehcnically living in the new municipality”, since most of them will probably physically remain in their settlements, just as I will keep living in Sisimiut. But the funny thing about geopolitical entities such as municipalities is that a change like the one we're seing in a couple of months has the potential to deeply affect people. A potential side effect of the project like ours could be even greater physical and informational distances between settlement offices and the central administration, which, however, really isn't anything new around here, since the local offices were already in the first place a great many roadless kilometers from the central departments to which they try and direct their most urgent questions related to settlement issues. And from where they more often than not get no constructive answer. Bleak reality? Well. So far that has just be the way things were.

But part of the reason I have come along to the conference is to ask questions such as: How do we help bring this oversized small-town place together and create a local administration which can answer to people's need for municipal services? And is it even necessary? Can't we just leave the small settlements to their own fate, as some people suggest?

I guess that if I were to ask the politicians the last of the above questions tomorrow at the first day of the conference the answer would be pretty clear.

But then what do we do?

As long as people live where they live we all share this new municipal space, and we all share the taxes, the land, and the local politics. There is no way around it. But the way through it certainly is not paved with money, and there is no real tradition for proactively communicating questions or even just daily organizational developments from the center to the periphery.

Looking at things from the center
People who read social science (or other) theories and have dealt with the centre-periphery issue at length at university will have to excuse me for taking this old road, but the point is that even if the concept is old news the problems persist: We, as a local governmental unit, are doing a very poor job communicating, listening to, and taking action on issues raised by our local settlement offices. It is simply too difficult for many employees in a town of 6000 to relate to the problems in a settlement of 120 people. Mostly because we do not have the methods to change our traditional course of action. Things raised at the settlement level often seem small, indifferent – they seem as if they can wait. And we let them wait. I'm sorry. We do.

Suggesting a solution
There is plenty of room for an improvement of the municpal service in the settlements, and tomorrow we will try and open a discussion with the settlement representatives based on a project which is based on a premise so simple it might sound like a joke that it isn't already a part of the organizational culture in a landscape as ours. Admittedly, this project was conceived by people like me, who work at the central administrational office, but my hope is that at least we can get a discussion going that will improve upon the original idea and make it fit with local needs.

The goal of the project is all about service minded communication between co-workers.
That's all.

We call the project Settlement Service (Nunaqarfinni Kiffartuussinneq in Greenlandic, and Bygdeservice in Danish and, incidentally, in Norwegian too), and the point of it is to make a cultural change in the organization in order to start adapting to the geographical reality of our municipality. It is like a mission statement for the future relations between center and periphery:

The administration will specifically allocate resources and manpower to further the communication all across the geographically separated parts of the organization. Call them the internal liaison officers.
The administration will develop and improve relations between all towns and settlements, communicating through all available technologies.
Within the municipality we will focus on understanding the importance of local issues as they appear to the locals, and we will deal with them accordingly and in a sensitive way.
The Settlement Service will help settlement offices gather and communicate knowledge on opportunities within business, tourism, education, or whatever else is relevant to the development of the given settlement.
The Settlement Service will also help speed up the answer-to-question ratio and make sure that settlement issues are not more prone to end up at the bottom of the pile than other issues.
The local settlement office employees and the Settlement Service will communicate as often as needed. The intention is to meet in person at least a few times a year (yes – that is about as often as we can hope to make that happen... sample cost: 15.000 Danish kroner or 2.500 US Dollars for a boat ride e.g. from Sisimiut to Sarfannguit and back. 1 hour each way.).
The central administration will not focus on direct aid or on trying to do the job on behalf of the locals based on a belief that otherwise it will not be done properly. Instead. things have to happen from below and they have to happen according to shared standards.

Hope: What a popular concept these days. And for a reason
Obviously this isn't a model specifically for the Arctic – improvements, comparisons, etc., could come from anywhere in the world, and of course the approach suggested here will not solve all problems. Far from it. Even the solution is nothing new to the world at large. Not at all.

But the message built into this is one that I believe relates to at least all of Greenland and possibly also to other geographically large and sparsely populated Arctic areas: We need to get better at coorporating and communicating. Regional and local administrations and governments need to make sure that they take seriously the local population living in the settlements as long as they live there. We need to provide a structure for local services which are geared to meet the interests of the people who need the services.

And I am very excited that there is a least no active local political opposition to the project, since this could actually mean that, given the right time, the idea might potentially develop on the ground, and in the hands of the people who will be a part of making things happen.

Whether this can bring about any social change remains to be seen, but my hope is that we can at least help begin the process to try and facilitate an environment for the production of more initiatives tailored to create a service minded and more people oriented public sector.

Happy thoughts.
I feel like swinging with Sinatra and singing ”the best is yet to come”.
Tomorrow we work.

thanks for reading this
_mads

The people called kiva.org

2008-11-03T16:30:00.000-08:00

Is p2p lending a part of future entrepreneurships in the Arctic? Small scale people-to-people loans can change lives and help entrepreneurs realize their dreams. This blog post touches on opportunities for micro financing in the Arctic.

Where do I start, where do I begin?

Consider starting your own company in a town or settlement in the Arctic, where you depend on expensive shipping, few local customers, monopolized internet with inflated prices, and a lack of finances from a working life that makes the wheels turn but not enough to move you beyond just getting by in a society where the living expenses don't match your income.

Where do you go as a startup to get help with much needed capital when you want to turn things around and run your own small company?

How do you, as an entrepreneur, find people willing to risk money on bold new ideas across an area as huge as the Circumpolar region?

And what if the answer from venture capitalists is always that geography and population sparsity provide such formidable obstacles as to count against your othwise mighty fine idea?

National structures, local needs

In Greenland we have an established business council, local trade councelors, and national funds for funding small entrepreneurs. You see, we have the structure and the people to help you with your idea. Yet somehow this structure seems to miss the entrepreneurs which are even smaller than the small ones. Or the ones in the smallest communities the furthest from the local trade centres.

National funding agencies work within established lines of bureaucracy and formalia, providing structured plans for potential start-ups which are really great if you already have money, if you live in one of the larger towns, if you know where to look for help, and if you feel comfortable interacting with these companies. I think that the problem for many people in Greenland is that they don't feel at home in such an established funding and consultant environment.

The result is that getting that tiny hostel for hikers up and running or selling your skills as a a small-scale caterer to the local community becomes very difficult. Especially since finding the often very little money needed to give it a try are hard to come by and it takes skill to work the system to your advantage.

MF-What?

My point of this whole excercise is to reach the level of Micro Finance Institutions, or MFIs, which could potentially be a way forward for entrepreneur funding in the Arctic in the future.

One such institution is Kiva, which prides itself of being ”the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website” where people from all over the world can log in and lend money to entrepreneurs by chosing from a global database of borrowers. You may already have heard of it, and if you have, you probably also know about Grameen Bank which is believed to hold another first: The first micro-credit institution, and the first bank to ”provide credit to the poorest of the poor”. But Kiva does things different from Grameen from at least three important perspectives:

1 – Loans through Kiva are provided by you or me based on our evaluation of the profiles of borrowers.

2 – Kiva is all online and is therefore a cheap and easily accesible global platform for person-2-person lending

3 – All loans are completely interest free. (Yes, no interest whatsoever).

But I would not be writing this post if I you could just go ahead and give loans to Arctic entrepreneurs. At this stage anyone can join Kiva and begin helping start-ups, but even if you live in the Arctic you are unable to find the girl with the grocery store or the guy with the local pizza delivery service asking for loans to begin or expand their small businesses.

The challenge here is the process that leads to the establishment of an MFI that can actually disburse the loans to the borrowers once they have been granted on the Kiva-website. Obviously lending is about trust and accountability – how would I otherwise know where my loan goes and how it is being repaid? Remember, we are not talking development aid here, we are talking actual loans. It is a social business, not a charity.

The MFI in Greenland and in the Arctic?

To become an MFI with Kiva takes becoming an MFI in the first place, and this is where I want to get to: Do we know of any Micro-Finance or Micro-Credit Institutions that operate in the Arctic? Do they meet or can they begin to meet the Kiva Field Partner minimum requirements? Oh, and do we even need an MFI in the Arctic? And why not?

I have no answers to the first two questions, the fourth is rhetorical, but my answer to the third question is Yes, we need an MFI or other such micro credit possibility that fits with the small-scale business context of the Arctic.

Speaking from a Greenlandic context I would define some of these context factors as:

Small and very small communities with no road connections
Expensive goods, expensive transportation, expensive internet
No or very little knowledge of English or other foreign languages (Danish is mandatory in local schools, but that is not the same as a local proficiency in Danish)
Limited mobility due to weather, geography, income, family subsistence, etc.
Local economies often based on being-there-businesses such as hunting, sealing, whaling, fishing
Adaptability and creativity help people change or respond to changes

Looking across the Arctic how does this resonate with conditions elsewhere? What are important factors elsewhere – in Nunavut, in Troms, etc.? And how much did I get the factors in my own backyard wrong – and if I did, who can please constructively correct me?

Could Kiva fit into the Arctic?

If you browse through the borrower profiles on Kiva one thing you might notice is the size of the loans. To someone like me with a steady public sector income in a country, where wages (and the price of groceries) are high compared to many other places around the world, a borrower asking for 900 US dollars, to expand a small moped-based taxi company in Uganda, seems like very little money.

But then again, I am no economist (actually I am only a social anthropologist) and I generally struggle to understand why there are such differences in the first place anyway. My point is that the size of the loans on Kiva reflect the current economies of countries and regions represented by local MFIs, and the borrowers are already among the least credit-worthy of the alreayd credit-unworthy.

In Greenland I suspect that borrowers would be asking for more money even for the smallest changes to happen. And even if our inflation is higher or the economy is stronger (or whatever it is – I told you, I am no economist) than, say, in Canada or Alaska, I have a feeling that loans would go into a couple or even a few thousand dollars per borrower in order for people to get off the ground. This certainly would be a challenge to the MFI people helping borrowers find lenders out there, but it is not an imposibility.

p2p lending is the new 2.0

I think p2p loans for Arctic entrepreneurs is possible, and I believe there are lenders out there who think the same way. Whether you want to borrow 100 or 5000 dollars you just need enough lenders giving 25 dollars to your business for things to add up and start happening. And by the rate of success displayed on Kiva, promoting Arctic entrepeneurs online could make social change happen in the entire Circompolar area at an unprecedented level, even if loans need to be noticably larger than the current loans on Kiva.

If in doubt take a few hours online with Kiva to study the progress of posted loan requests and witness the power of the surge when people join forces in the pursuit of a common goal. To me this is social businesses 2.0, and a step forward and beyond the Grameen concept.

And while you're there become a member and sign up for the Team Arctic lending team.

I guess what is needed for even considering an MFI or something similar is people with enough skills to put together a viable solution for micro credit which fits with the many different communities, cultures, and people around the Arctic Circle, and help is available through training programs like Grameen's or via online tutorials. But I guess you have to have more than an anthropologist with no sense of finance on the team.

So, who is up for the challenge?

Or who has already taken up the challenge?

Bring your news, knowledge, questions and comments to the blog and help push this issue forward.

Thanks for reading this.

_Mads

Welcome to the inuissues blog

2008-11-01T19:11:00.000-07:00

This blog is an attempt to spread knowledge, ideas and experiences related to local development in the Arctic, based on approaches that focus on local needs and experiences.

I call the blog "inuissues" because I want it to address pan-Arctic social issues and experiences. This is not a blog with a focus on ethnicity, even if Inuit Issues might sound like that. What belongs here is the question: How can people across the Arctic take social change into their own hands?

I have heard some people use the term "people powered" about projects trying to change anything from energy consumption habits to community business models. This blog will try and address such people powered issues, beginning with the dissemination of knowledge from and disscussion of projects around the world that might inspire people in the Arctic to take up similar ideas and fit them to their specific communities, areas, countries or even to the entire Circumpolar Region.

I hope that the blog will become a forum for openminded and creative discussions and inspiration. You are all - as in: globally - invited to improve ideas put forward here, steal ideas put forward here, or simply just read and comment on ideas put forward here. As long as we can share, we can create, and I'd like this to be as open a project as possible, thereby hopefully reaching people with the necessary ressources - be they financial, social or any other - to make changes happen.

- mads