Sustainable development and sacrifice in the rural North

Abstract

In this article, I examine how the grand narratives of sustainability, development and mining impact local governance in a Swedish municipality. I do this by studying three mining projects under implementation and relate them to notions of development and sacrifice to lend insights into what the new trends of mining in Europe outlined above mean for the rural North. I regard sustainable development as a political concept ascribed to activities (such as political programmes or investments). Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Storuman municipality, I show how politicians, political parties and government administrators position themselves in relation to the three mining projects. I provide a detailed account of perceptions, responses and practices in a local government that engage with three mining companies seeking to open mines within the municipal borders. I show how a tug of war between ideas of sustainable development or survival through sacrifice depoliticises and stabilises a dominant political line in favour of mining within local politics. While the respondents differed in what they thought that sacrifice might lead to, ranging from environmental disaster and social suffering to economic prosperity, I reveal a process wherein sustainable development becomes translated into ‘that which must be sacrificed’.