Rebecca Lawrence

Recognition Struggles in Trans‐national Arenas: Negotiating Identities and Framing Citizenship

Abstract The purpose of this article is to incorporate trans‐national actors and institutions into citizenship theory both theoretically and empirically. We analyze three cases of recognition movements promoting gender, ethnic/minority and indigenous rights. Using one societal context, Sweden, we map the processes and mechanisms of power and agency (boundary‐making and brokering) that shape how trans‐national institutions and actors offer new forms of leverage politics to recognition movements as well as constrain their agency. These mechanisms of power are formalized in a model showing the multi‐level effects of leverage politics on recognition movements. Our three cases of recognition politics demonstrate the increasingly complex links between actors in policy communities across regional, national, European and international levels. They also reveal the processes implicit in our model: that policy imports are reframed when translated into specific national political cultures; and more broadly, that national citizenship frames of membership and inclusion are not easily dislodged.

Internal Colonisation and Indigenous Resource Sovereignty: Wind Power Developments on Traditional Saami Lands

Using the concept of internal colonisation, this paper aims to demonstrate how current disputes over wind power developments in traditional Saami mountain areas have reignited contestations between Saami people and the Swedish state. It traces the historical continuities in these contestations. It also analyses shifts in the discourses legitimising the states nonrecognition of Saami rights to land. The paper explores three discursive frameworks that reflect these continuities and shifts. First, it traces contestations over the ownership of ‘Crown’ (ie, state) land and the paternalistic practices of the state. Second, it explores how a discourse of renewable energy is currently being mobilised to argue that Saami interests must necessarily give way to broader environmental concerns. Third, it analyses how long-standing colonial rationalities are rearticulated through market relations, as the state seeks to construct a pseudo planning market for wind power developments, which necessarily excludes Saami interests. These debates, and the ongoing resistances by Saami people to industrial encroachments on their traditional territories, highlight the fundamentally unresolved relations between the Saami and the non-Indigenous majority society in Sweden.

The politics of planning: assessing the impacts of mining on Sami lands

Abstract This article examines the implications of undertaking community-based impact assessment (CBIA) in the Swedish context where Indigenous rights receive little recognition and the institutional planning environment is disenabling. It explores how normative biases built into the permitting process for mines ontologically privilege non-Indigenous ways of defining what constitutes relevant impacts. We show how the CBIA, undertaken by an impacted Sami community together with the authors, attempted to challenge these biases by constructing narratives about future impacts from the perspective of the Indigenous community. We also discuss how the research itself became embroiled in contestations over what constituted legitimate knowledge.

First Nations and the Politics of Indigeneity: Australian perspectives on Indigenous peoples, resource management and global rights

Many academic researchers are drawn to Scandinavia because of the perception of its model social democratic institutions, associated high standards of living and progressive social policy. A plethora of work, concerned mainly with comparing Scandinavian welfare states with other nations outside that region, frames Scandinavian states as ideal models of social responsibility and as leading global citizens. This is a viewpoint also eagerly embraced by the governments of those Scandinavian states. And indeed, in some respects this reputation may be well deserved. However, Scandinavia’s own Indigenous people, the Saami, might reasonably question where their own claims for recognition, self-determination and resource rights fit within this model of apparently progressive social responsibility. A notable exception to much of the published literature is the work of geographer Allan Pred (2000): his book Even in Sweden: racisms, racialized spaces and the popular geographical imagination confronts and challenges these images of apparent social responsibility in an analysis of contemporary racisms in Sweden. Even Pred, however, ignores Saami issues in his discussion. Indigenous peoples*/resource management and global rights , by Jentoft, Minde and Nilsen, addresses this question, whilst also contributing to broader discussions concerning Indigenous peoples more globally. In order to situate our review of this book we should first position our own work in this field of Indigenous issues. Both

Indigenous Self-determination through a Government Agency? The Impossible Task of the Swedish Sámediggi

The last two decades have witnessed a growing global acknowledgement of indigenous rights, for instance manifested in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples . The Nordic countries have all responded to the rights claims of the indigenous Sami people by establishing popularly elected Samediggis (Sami Parliaments) to serve as their representative bodies. Internationally, the Samediggis are often referred to as ‘models’ for indigenous self-governance and participation. Using in-depth interviews with politicians and civil servants, this article provides the first empirical study of the daily work of the Swedish Samediggi , with a specific focus on its institutional design as a government agency with dual roles: as an administrative authority under the Swedish government and as a popularly elected representative body of the Sami people. We examine how these dual roles affect the work of the Samediggi and if the Swedish Samediggi safeguards the Sami right to self-determination.

NGO campaigns and banks: Constituting risk and uncertainty

This chapter analyses the private financial sectors policy responses, lending practices and various forms of engagement with non-governmental organisations (NGOs), communities and institutional clients involved in controversial commodity industries. The chapter demonstrates that secrecy plays a constitutive role in this engagement. For investment banks, client-confidentiality is the ultimate limit to transparency. At the same time, NGOs campaign to make public and reveal links between investment banks and clients in commodity industries. The chapter also explores techniques within the financial sector for the assessment of social and environmental risk. The chapter argues that these techniques combine both practices of uncertainty and practices of risk. For civil society organisations, NGOs and local communities, these techniques remain problematic, and various campaigns question both the robustness of the financial sectors social risk screening methods as well as the sustainability of the investments themselves.