This project will investigate the connection between development of mining activities, knowledge politics and valuation of landscape in selected case sites in Russia, Greenland and Norway. It meets the requirements of the call through its focus on the interrelated aspects of industrialized development and environmental concerns, and on how politics can help solve environmental problems through incorporating the value of ecosystem services and a broadened valuation concept.

The project will thus give attention to the way particular knowledge systems (both scientific and public) influence environmental and developmental policies, and how landscape and its value as recreational, occupational and harvesting grounds is recognized in processes in which extraction and commercialization of mineral resources is in focus. The concept of “sacrifice zones” will be used a contrast to “sustainable landscapes” in a continuum. The work will be organized as a study of how national, regional and local environmental management and regulation of mining activities influences landscapes and landscape use in the case sites chosen, and on whether a focus on ecosystem services and a broad valuation concept may enable management to avoid the emergence of sacrifice zones in connection with the mining industry.