What Makes a Good Life in the Arctic?

How do we know whether people are living well? When measuring life in the Arctic, researchers argue that standard measures may miss some of the things that matter most.

What makes a good life? In a recent interview, American political scientist Oran Young reflected on decades of work trying to answer that question for people living in the North.

Young was co-chair of the steering committee behind the first Arctic Human Development Report, published in 2004. The report argued that established measures of human development were useful in the Arctic, but did not capture everything that mattered to people living there.

How do we measure a good life?

One of the best-known global measures is the UN Human Development Index. It combines three dimensions: health, measured through life expectancy; education, measured through years of schooling; and standard of living, measured through income.

Such indicators allow researchers and policymakers to track whether living conditions are improving and to compare developments between places and over time.

For the Arctic, researchers retained familiar dimensions covering health, education and material well-being, but added three considered particularly important in the North: fate control, cultural well-being and contact with nature.

The next challenge was working out how to measure them. Beginning in 2006, the Arctic Social Indicators project developed practical indicators that could be used to monitor these different aspects of life in Arctic communities.

What is important in the Arctic?

The three additional Arctic dimensions are less conventional and also more difficult to put into numbers.

Fate control concerns the ability of people and communities to influence decisions that shape their lives. Researchers proposed indicators looking at decision-making power and control over resources, including how much public funding is controlled locally.

Cultural well-being considers the ability of communities to maintain their culture and identity. Language vitality and retention were among the measures proposed for assessing it.

Contact with nature recognises the particularly close relationship with the environment found in many Arctic communities. But how do you put a number on that relationship? Researchers proposed the consumption or harvesting of traditional or local foods as one practical indicator.

A second phase of the project later tested the approach in different parts of the Arctic to see how well the indicators worked in practice.

The Arctic approach highlights something broader: what constitutes a good life can depend on where and how people live. By adding less usual measures, researchers hoped to track changes in aspects of life that matter particularly in the North but can easily be missed by standard international indicators.

Dr. Yana Kirichenko, PolarJournal