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Arctic Yearbook 2014
‘invest’ physical capital in human development that captures a larger part of the profits of
exploitation for domestic use.
Policy and academic research into these options has expanded as demand for fossil fuels has grown.
Little economic attention is being paid to the environmental impact of high levels of GHG
emissions from contemporary extraction strategies, beyond suggesting that carbon taxes would help
everyone care more about GHG levels. However, there is growing awareness that careful
management of resource industries offer governments a chance to increase the rate of formation of
human skills and knowledge, invest physical capital in social infrastructure such as care resources
and in conservation, anti-pollution, and renewable energy infrastructure, and accumulate sovereign
wealth funds that can be used to reduce national debt, stabilize economic swings, or develop
national capital in new forms.
Norway is frequently held up as a ‘paragon of plenty’ because it has largely escaped the paradox of
plenty, and has also invested state oil revenues in a sovereign wealth fund that is set aside for
pension stability. Norway also uses its jurisdiction over its own oil reserves to require local supply,
operating base, and labour content in development contracts, and its development agent, Statoil, is
not permitted to securitize new oil finds, but is required to own and develop them. Although the
Norwegian government owns its own extraction company (now shared with private investors via
public stock exchange listings), countries that exhibit anti-state ownership biases like the US have
never had any difficulty welcoming Statoil into their oil fields as a developer.
Each of these resource revenue management models can still leave women in northern regions,
indigenous women, and women throughout each circumpolar state increasingly under-developed
and even impoverished. Gender-equal taxation and distribution of state resource revenues is as
important as indigenous self-governance and gender-equal employment, access to resources, and
state supports. Even the countries at the very top of the human development and gender equality
rankings have not solved these problems fully. Norway has done the best job of maintaining a
significant degree of state ownership of resource capital in all forms, but much less than Sweden in
securing gender equality. In contrast, Sweden has combined diversified economic development with
the highest levels of gender equality overall, but one of the highest rates of women in part-time work
and low levels of wage equality (Pettit & Hook 2009: 5-8). At the same time, Sami women in Sweden
have high levels of educational attainment but constrained control over traditional resources and
much less income equality. Thorough examination of the full array of fiscal gender issues is thus
called for as an aspect of solving the paradox of plenty now facing all circumpolar states.
Conclusion
As circumpolar states empower the Arctic Council and other regional governance bodies to take on
increased leadership roles, it is urgent that they take three crucial steps toward fulfilling their
responsibilities:
Gender Challenges