Human Capital and Sustainable Development in the Arctic: Towards Intellectual and Empirical Framing

Abstract

One of the aspects of sustainable development in the Arctic is shifting the region’s reliance from non-renewable resources and the public sector to economies increasingly based on knowledge and innovation. Knowledge, creative, and cultural economies represent economic sectors heavily embedded into internal community capacities and intangible competitive advantages. This chapter extends the discussion of the relevance of formal and informal education and knowledge to sustainable development in the Arctic. It discusses patterns and trends in post-secondary educational attainment and attendance in the last decade and provides an assessment of human capital and knowledge production in the Arctic. It also identifies and discusses persistent and emerging human formal education gaps in the Arctic (spatial, gender, Indigenous/non-Indigenous, formal/informal and entrepreneurial). The chapter offers conceptual and qualitative links between human capital accumulation, the knowledge economy and sustainable regional development.