1.1 Social-environmental systems and typologies

It is now accepted that the interactions between the human and the non-human are so tightly linked that the “coupled social-ecological system” can be addressed as an integrated unit of analysis [7,12]. An interdisciplinary literature examining the attributes of social-ecological systems (SESs) has developed that strives to understand the feedbacks between society and ecosystems in order to inform institutional arrangements and management practices [12–14] and what the management goals for such complex systems may be [5,15]. Anderies et al. [14] define a social-ecological system (SES) as “an ecological system intricately linked with and affected by one or more social systems.” In order to capture non-living features in the system such as sea ice [16] we change “ecological” to “environmental,” cleaving more to the National Academy of Sciences description of the core dynamic of an SES as an interaction when “system A affects system B, and system B, in turn, affects system A as a two-way interaction” [17,18]. Both the social and environmental components of a system have self-organizing independent relationships contained within them. For example, the Porcupine Caribou Herd is a complex ecological unit, composed of numerous individuals, but operating as a unitary sub-system. This sub-system interacts with the landscape and broader environment (through consumption of vegetation and lichen, drinking of water, decomposition of bodies), with other species (e.g., as prey), with the Gwich’in people (providing cultural, spiritual, and caloric sustenance), and with the federal US and Canadian governments (through being inscribed as resources of national significance). In sum, the socio-economic and political natures of human populations are in part determined by how these populations interact with their natural surroundings. It is the historic coherence of this mutually-constituting condition of complex socio-natures in the NSB that allows us to define it as the provisional core system under analysis. As Andrachuk and Armitage [18] point out, system identity is a heuristic that allows for an examination of patterns of continuance and transformation. Identity and transformation are thus mutually-constitutive as well as mutually-limiting.

More specifically, the ecological elements of a location are “formative in the development and maintenance of human identities” through iterative interactions between humans, their environment, and the web of normative relationships created in the SES tied to markets, rule sets, cultures, technologies, and sensory cues [19,50]. Consequently, people living and working in a particular environment with a particular array of imposed rule sets and personal choices–such as those in the North Slope Borough where the communities are tied physically, economically, and existentially to both ice regimes and hydrocarbon production–will have similar experiences and engage in some similar behaviors. We argue that the social and physical construction of petroleum producing installations within Arctic political jurisdictions below the national level are a particular type of SES.

The environmental changes happening in concert with socio-economic changes across the Arctic are tied primarily to global trends of market expansion in shipping, market growth, and resource extraction industries such as mining, oil, and gas. Such exogenous factors impact the NSB both directly, through localized pollution events, and indirectly, through contributing to climate change and moving economic wealth and opportunity to different locations. The general demographic trend in the Arctic, including Arctic Alaska, is slow population growth overall, with populations growing in cities as smaller rural communities gradually depopulate [20]. Because most of rural Alaska and a majority of its Indigenous inhabitants operate in a mixed-subsistence economy in which store-bought foods, wild-harvested foods, and fuel are vital components of maintaining food security [21–24]. Forces influencing the biological productivity of the local landscape have an outsize effect on regional food security, making dependence on a limited and hazardous economic portfolio risky.

1.2 Resilience and transformation

Early theorists of resilience distinguished ecological from engineering resilience. In the former, focusing on capacity for persistence and adaptation and in the latter the capacity to “bounce back” after a disturbance, but both hinging on a mechanistic, modern concern with an equilibrium [25]. As originally formulated, resilience had no application to policy or social theory. On the heels of the sustainability discourse, however, resilience has become a key concept to define the magnitude of disturbance a system can undergo before it enters a different state with different dynamics and parameters [26]. For our purposes, we use the Arctic Resilience Report [4] definition as the “capacity to cope with stress and shocks by responding or reorganizing in ways that maintain essential identity, function, and structures, as well as the capacity to navigate and shape change, including transformational change (xvii)”. Resilience can be identified across scales: system-wide resilience, indicating overall stability, or the resilience of a given component, retaining its own function and identity amidst change. A single change of sufficient magnitude, such as with climate or pollution, can push whole systems (and their composite parts) over thresholds, whereas gradual change across a sufficient number of components, can likewise trigger a change in system identity. Resilience is a measure of how easily this can occur. The Arctic Resilience Report further defines “transformation” as a “fundamental change to the coupled social-ecological system” (xvii). Transformations, as with resilient phenomena, have no inherent positive or negative tendency; they are evaluated from the diverse vantage points of people and the sectors of society located within and outside of the system. Because systems are nested, actors may perceive a transformation because of significant changes in a component or sub-system, though this may not precipitate a classifiable transformation in whatever larger system is under investigation.

In this paper, with the NSB as our geographically and jurisdictionally-bounded system, transformations will only refer to those changes that qualitatively reconfigure the whole system. Oran Young [27] provides us a concise typology of transformations that can occur in a system: inflections, cascades, and explosions. Inflection refers to “asymmetrical changes in key variables that alter the dynamics of complex systems in such a way that the systems experience transformative changes over time” [ibid. 72]. Cascades depend on a single event that triggers a positive feedback loop, with a “domino effect” progression; Young uses the example of the Great Depression and its contribution to the rise of Fascism in Germany. And explosions, as the name suggests, are abrupt state changes—examples include the onset of war, natural catastrophes, and radical changes in electoral politics. We will use this typology to understand the nature and long-term impacts of changes in the NSB.

2.1 DAPSI(W)R(M) as a tool for structuring the problem of transformation

It can be difficult to evaluate relationships between system components within a Social-Environmental System. An increasingly used interdisciplinary [30] framework for integrated coastal and marine management is DAPSI(W)R(M) [31,32]. Our use of this decision-support tool is not to suggest decisions that should be made, but to provide the information necessary, about a SES, to consider making decisions. It helps explain how the different parts of the system relate across scales by structuring the elements of any SES. The key feature of this framework is its disentanglement of a SES’s drivers, human activities, pressures on the system as a result of human activities, state changes in the environment, impacts to human well-being, and human responses labeled measures. Lovecraft and Meek [33] have adapted the DAPSI(W)R(M) framework to examine Arctic coastal systems and provide a discussion of the advantages and limitations of its use for such locations. It is important to note that the framework itself only categorizes the effects of these system elements, it does not value or prioritize them. Below we offer a diagram of the NSB system and the primary factors impacting it within the structure provided by DAPSIWRM (Fig 1).

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Fig 1. Application of the DAPSIWRM framework to the North Slope of Alaska.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000028.g001

The Drivers are represented as features of human desire in the globalized Anthropocene. They have no fixed or singular cause or institution; they are unregulable and fundamental. The primary suite of Activities that concern us are those producing changes in specifically the coastal and cryosphere features of the North Slope of Alaska. Pressures are the results of activities that create system changes for humans and environments. Cormier, Elliott, & Rice describe pressures as creating risks in society [34].

State changes are not temporary, but constitute what can be identified as a change in the environmental portion of the system. Critical thresholds in sea salinity, invasive species dominance, sea ice loss, or urbanization, can be regarded as state changes, which Elliot et al. [35] describe as “a signal against a background of inherent variability (‘noise’) to relate to the natural system (the ecology) due to single or multiple Pressures. This includes both the physico- chemical variables (i.e. sediment type, dissolved oxygen, organic matter, etc.) and biological health at all levels of organization—the cellular system, individuals, populations, communities and ecosystems.” Lastly, we describe Impacts at broad scales (such as widespread food and water insecurity and associated concerns of health and well-being, framed from both Western and Indigenous perspectives), and local scale impacts (such as loss of subsistence opportunity). The suite of Measures (responses) can occur at local, national and international levels, but may not address all of the impacts on the North Slope SES. Due to the history of the region we have records that can directly link state changes to pressures and then up to activities which are the result of human drives for material goods, food, energy, or human identity in a specific time period. We detail this in the discussion of the historical transformations below.

2.2 Periodization as a tool for understanding the history of transformation

Above we have structured the contemporary problem of the North Slope Borough in a way that demonstrates the location as one of centuries-long steady externally-driven resource extraction Pressures, by forces not open to local input even through Alaska Statehood, that have changed the State of the region and fundamentally altered the lives of Inuit and other Alaska Natives. Measures to empower the Indigenous population or resist global market exploitation have been relatively weak feedbacks in a SES that has continued to produce products for global commerce. Why?

Periodization of changing system identity organizes historical sources of continuity and novelty in order to understand how system conditions have shaped the path of development [18,36]. The emergence and persistence of properties in social-environmental systems over the past feeds directly into how system identity and other properties may act in the future. We use the study of institutions, those sets of rules defining the nature of the North Slope Borough, to ground our periodization, rather than periods of environmental change, because the nature of the location has had a relatively stable environment through its most recent period of oil development. It is the direct and targeted push for the extraction of resources significant to the global economy that has changed the rules for the borough region for over a century. Following Lieberman, this section has evaluated the outcomes of the SES by analyzing “the joint effect of changing, noninstitutional variables,” the Pressures and State changes, on the “sticky institutional factors that tend to change more slowly” ([37]; page 1013). In this manner,

Periodization is a cornerstone of virtually all historical analysis that involves the simplification of history through the recognition of certain types of events or processes as more “important” than others… and that uses the dates of those events as dividing lines for a chronology. Periods are bounded by important events, changes, or turning points that can be conceptualized as markers of variation in a potentially important explanatory variable…Within a mass of historical observations, only a few events define a period, whereas most other events and processes are explained as taking place during a period [ibid. 1017].

Through this method we have identified five distinct periods in the evolution of the Alaska North Slope system that are distinguished by political, economic, environmental, and intersectional thresholds, each leading to novel dynamics and trends within the total system. We use these insights to narrate the history of Alaska’s North Slope as a region that has evidenced multiple system identities through gradual integration of both endogenous and exogenous forces. By establishing separate periods that define the region, we can then determine if the key variables binding the current period are destabilizing, reorganizing, or changing.

2.3 Scenarios as a tool for projecting future transformations

Having articulated the history of transformation and its processural structure, our final step in characterizing the NSB SES depends on the use of scenarios methods to identify the likeliest sources of novelty and uncertainty in the future. Scenarios work, in our experience, has two dominant strains that respectively fall into social and environmental disciplinary silos: participatory scenarios of futures and scenarios based on environmental modeling. The participatory scenarios approach has been applied on the North Slope to engage communities and decision-makers with a breadth of perspectives on North Slope futures [107,108]. In-person discussions during participatory scenarios workshops provide the opportunity for knowledge exchange and social learning that can form the basis for creative scenario narratives that do not require quantifying or constraining uncertainty. This allows wild-card events such as the occurrence of a major Arctic oil spill or influential geopolitical events to be considered in scenarios of SES transformation. In contrast, scenarios based on modeled environmental phenomena such as air temperature and sea ice change with different emission scenarios tend to focus on quantifiable, physical aspects of SES change. Both types of scenarios approaches are included in the discussion as each approach provides a unique component of future system transformation research.

2.4 Addressing scales and sources of change

Using these three methods, we can better understand the complex set of dynamic relationships that threads across transnational industries and U.S. federal and state politics to shape the well-being of individuals in the NSB. Degrading impacts on the environment and Indigenous food security create disproportionate harms to Arctic communities, both economically and medically, with likely downstream consequences for government expenditures on medical and food provisioning [118]. Likewise, individuals, movements, and biophysical resources from within the NSB have dramatically impacted the systems of which they are a part, not least in terms of enhancing both natural and economic value and supporting year-round populations. We structure our method around the problematic of cross-scalar relations in the development of a bounded system over time. But, to explain the system’s identity, or “type”, it is necessary to understand the development of its defining path dependencies, core elements, and social construction (modes of representation), which each have distinct spatial and temporal elements.

It is important to recognize that what is “manageable” (Endogenous) and not manageable (Exogenous) in a SES can be a fuzzy line. Measures are often endogenous rules, laws, and practices that target activities in response to the impacts on human well-being. Between the NSB coastal communities and the largely exogenous Pressure of climate change there are some effects that can be managed even though management of them in no way can change the nature of the Pressure. There is a strong disconnect between the causes of what is changing our cryosphere–global Drivers and Activities–and the possible Measures that could be taken at a local level. Naturally, as one scales up in governance more possibilities arise to mitigate the impacts of emissions and development. In sum, DAPSI(W)R(M) demonstrates a way to create a defined set of variables that make up a system for analysis. It provides a structure to the key relationships across the system that let one analyze the flows of people and their environment. From this we can inquire about the historical nature of the NSB SES identity and whether climate change will push this place into transition and transformation.

3.1 Overview the NSB region and bounded periods of identity

Over more than two-hundred-years, from initial contacts to the present Great Acceleration [38], the ecology and society of the North Slope was irrevocably diminished by exogenous markets. Disease, violence, and other products of settler colonialism reduced the Alaska Native population, estimated at nearly 140,000 prior to contact, to 28,300 by 1900 [39], paving the way for the expropriation of native lands and wealth and imposition of settler structures [40]. The gold rush of the 1890s doubled Alaska’s non-native population, altering the landscape with mining operations and permanent settlements and instigating new instruments of governance. By 1950, Euro-American settlers, concentrated largely in the south, comprised approximately 72% of Alaska’s total population. Soon, prospects for state control of resource wealth, civil institutions, and commerce would serve to destabilize, then push the “frontier” system into a new regime, firmly embedded in US federalism and subject to a wider range of local and national interests. The initial breach in “isolation” in 1744 constituted a tipping point—an explosion transformation [27]—as imperial projects of expansion realized Alaska’s colonial potential, driving commercial and state interests alike to enclose and exploit the region. By 1959, at the time of statehood, the North Slope Iñupiat found themselves disenfranchised subjects, whose region had national scientific interest but few modern economic opportunities. They were increasingly cognizant of impending changes to land tenure rules. At the millennium the science of climate change was coming into focus around the globe. Shortly after it was discovered that the Earth’s poles are warming at rates twice as fast as the rest of the planet and this strongly disrupts Arctic coastal social-environmental systems.

3.2 Discussion of a subnational “Petro State”

This periodization demonstrates how institutional formation, clusters of Measures, in response to Pressures from Activities, has altered the State of the environment and society differently over time creating distinct periods of organization in the North Slope Borough. Since the exploitation of the Prudhoe Bay field, the regional social system, despite being highly dependent on a healthy environment, has accepted and become almost inextricably intertwined with the extractive regime. Yet, it was primed for this “post-colonial identity” based on over a century of externally-driven natural resource extraction and, at best, general disregard for Indigenous peoples [119]. We do not use this phrase “post-colonial” given that the appropriate term should represent a context that is working against the legacies of colonialism. But the social, material, and power flows of Alaska’s Arctic boroughs demonstrates ongoing, though not totalizing, re-inscription of the various powers of colonialism [119].

Considering the low levels of direct local employment in the oil fields (locals predominantly work in Alaska Native Corporation-owned contracting companies) and the “cost of doing business” with the North Slope Iñupiat, it is difficult to say that the industry has the same dependence on the regional system. The obligation of any oil company to the NSB is secured only by the Alaska Constitution and the Borough Act through the right of taxation, limited operations on Alaska Native Corporation-owned lands, and more recent contractual agreements with locally-owned companies. Industry must comply with these strictures in order to maintain legitimate access to the subsoil resources.

As a municipality with an Indigenous majority, Indigenous corporate structures, and extensive taxation powers, NSB’s structure of socioeconomic and enviro-infrastructural relations is unique in the Arctic, but also embodies dynamics that can be found elsewhere. This type of imbalanced and extractive interdependency is mirrored in numerous distinct forms across the Arctic [e.g. 79–82], constituting what we consider a distinct type of Arctic system: O&G SES. In other contexts, the coupling of extraction and community livelihoods may be characterized by Impact-Benefit Agreements, Environmental Impact Assessments, Private-Public Partnerships, or Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives. Especially in northern mixed economies, access to regular payouts and other forms of material support from industry become critical to community planning when considering subsistence access and food security, mobility, and safety. It is this coupling between northern community and industry, which in many cases drives path dependency, that defines an Arctic O&G SES and presents an opportunity to develop a functional typology.

An Arctic O&G SES can be considered a smaller scale variation on what is often referred to as a “petrostate.” Petrostates are frequently identified with the “resource curse” [83], which entails significant political shifts towards smaller government, reduced democratic accountability, and indices of corruption under the influence of sudden massive surges of natural resource-derived capital. As their original theorist, Karl, describes, petro-states “rely on an unsustainable development trajectory fueled by an exhaustible resource–and the very rents produced by this resource form an implacable barrier to change… Petro-states are not like other states…the economies and politics of countries dependent on oil are rapidly and relentlessly shaped by the influx of petrodollars…Oil wealth molds institutions more dramatically” [84,30–31]. While some scholars have used the term “oil state” and its path dependency to describe the state of Alaska [e.g. 85–88], Lee Huskey [89] has argued that the NSB has itself avoided many of the pitfalls of the resource curse by redistributing wealth through government employment, investing in public infrastructure, allocating it to environmental protection, and putting a substantial amount into savings. Yet these actions have only been made possible via hydrocarbon production. The political and geographic scale at which the NSB is able to operate is significant and contrasts sharply from the scales at which, for example, reindeer herders in the Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Russia, or Cree, Dene, and Metis peoples in Alberta are able to take advantage of local oil development [90,91]. Interdependencies in both financial and environmental terms are functionally, if not structurally, equivalent.

This raises the potential to develop a typology of such coupled systems across the Arctic, with shared and divergent indicators that can inform approaches to economic transitions, social justice issues, and resource management. In Table 1, we offer seven possible variables by which an O&G SES might be defined: Size of Dominant Companies, Financial Value of Resource Deposit, Year for Beginning of Exploitation, State Policy Mechanism, Indigenous Demographic, Quality of Industry-Community Relationship, Presence of Ecologically Important Species/Landforms. Together, these indicators can paint a baseline picture of the stakes, power dynamics, and historicity of each O&G SES and facilitate the development of criteria for transition away from hydrocarbon extraction in the circumpolar north. Key to this typological development is considering the nested nature of a petroleum dependent jurisdiction—these are not nations and thus cannot behave as such in global affairs. Other traits shared by Arctic specific O&G SES include the presence of organized intermediaries between industry and Indigenous peoples, societal rifts caused by equivocal industrial activity, and, critically, the subjection of the relationship between oil and people to formal legal regulation. For example, the Nenets organization Yasavey has long had the right to oversee land transfers and compensation between herders and oil companies [92] while the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission engages with offshore oil and gas companies in a collaborative annual process to avoid adverse impacts to whale migration and hunting [93]. Rosemary Ahtuangaruak [94] denounces ANCSA’s role in disempowering tribal government in relation to Native Corporations, and Marjorie Balzer [95] cites cases of Khanty energy company employees pressuring community members to sign land exploration waivers. In light of these similarities, we have organized the table above, which depicts key variables across a suggested typology of Arctic O&G SES. But how long can this particular SES identity last given that oil and gas are non-renewable resources and public commitment to decarbonize is growing in North America and around the world?

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Table 1. Preliminary OGSES Typology Chart.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000028.t001

3.3 Scenarios of transformation potential in the North Slope Borough

As discussed in the previous section, the North Slope SES has not previously experienced environmental change at a magnitude that caused a transformation in system identity. Rather, its system identity has been defined and redefined by exogenous pressures of extraction, such as global marketplace prices for oil or the thickening of the State of Alaska’s budgetary and legal mechanisms in support of oil exploration and production. The question of whether or not the current oil and gas identity can withstand an environmental disruption is open to inquiry. Huntington et al. [96] describe political-economic tipping points in the Arctic where rapid environmental change coupled with rising costs for responding to climate change impacts can endanger the future of remote Arctic communities. These costs have already created patterns of outmigration that could foreshadow a transformation that the current inflationary period could exacerbate.

Strategic futures research can help actors at all levels grapple with the uncertainty of future change. “Scenarios provide a flexible but informed perspective on a range of plausible socio-economic and environmental outcomes…Although inherently forward-looking, scenarios are not explicit models of the future…using scenarios is often a process of asking what if?” ([120]; page 217). Below we briefly review how key environmental trends directly affecting the North Slope Borough are considered from a modeled futures perspective. A comparison between climate model scenarios and a synthesis of recent participatory scenarios for Northern Alaska also places the climate modeled scenarios of regional change in the broader context of other socio-economic features that influence transformation on the North Slope.