RESOURCE-BASED DEVELOPMENT & THE CHALLENGE
OF
ECONOMIC DIVERSIFICATION
IN THE
MINING
COMMUNITIES OF THE MURMANSK REGION
Tuomas Suutarinen
Natural resources play a key role in the economic development of the Russian North. However, natural resource extraction
cannot alone promote the long-term socio-economic sustainability of resource peripheries. My paper analyses the challenges of
economic diversification in two single-industry mining towns in the Murmansk region, Kirovsk and Revda, which have taken
different historical development paths. Tourism has developed in Kirovsk alongside the mining industry since the 1930s, while
mining has been the only significant industry in Revda. However, recently both Kirovsk and Revda have adopted tourism as the
main target of their economic diversification. My paper asks how the challenge of diversifying the economic development of these
two communities can be explained by path-dependency, the resource curse and paternalism. The empirical data of the study was
collected by the author on fieldwork trip in 2012. It consists of semi-structured interviews with town, region and enterprise
representatives in Kirovsk, Revda and Murmansk. Moreover, articles from regional and local newspapers concerning the
diversification efforts of these two communities were used. Both interviews and articles were analyzed using qualitative methods.
The paper reveals how the different development paths of these communities have shaped their ability to promote economic
diversification in the present era. This paper shows that the obstacles to economic diversification are not only related to obvious
issues, such as the lack of realistic alternatives, but also to deeper structural hindrances to the use of local potential and human
capital to create diversified local economies in the Russian Arctic.
Introduction
The extraction and export of natural resources forms the basis of the Russian economy. This
dependence on natural resources is most visible at the local level in natural resource communities.
However, the long-term geo-economic sustainability of natural resource extraction has been
questioned by various scholars and the Russian state (Connolly 2011; Anokhin et al. 2014). Whilst
economic modernization and the diversification of the Russian economy was first mentioned during