Sustainable development in sparsely populated regions

Sustainable development in sparsely populated regions: The case of the Russian Arctic and Far East (SD-SPR)

This project is scheduled for Sept 2019 – May 2020 and is financed by the Mobility Fund of the Academy of Finland.

Sparsely populated regions (SPR) face new challenges with the expansion of globalisation, climate change, changes in energy policy, as well as changing population structure. They also often become a target of special policy programs aimed at developing these regions’ economies. Yet, is such development sustainable? And what is sustainable development in SPRs? Through interdisciplinary work that builds on economics, public administration, geospatial and geophysical research, this project seeks to adapt the concept of sustainable development to SPR and develop methodologies that will allow to assess the effectiveness of various policy measures. Pulling socioeconomic and remote sensing data from three different sources into one database, this project will apply panel data methods to scrutinize the developments of SPR of the Russian Arctic and Far East for the period 2006-2018 and develop new methodologies for public policy assessment.