4 Discussion
4.1 Scenarios connect back to the LDA analysis
Following the structured futuring approach, and the creation of the story-based scenarios, we examined whether the resultant stories bore a resemblance to the original LDA topics. Each of the narratives was iteratively reviewed to ensure both that (a) the story content reflected the corresponding topic clustering and the topic keywords, and (b) that each story did not too-closely resemble the content of another set of topic keywords. This review process helped to ensure that each scenario depicted relatively unique elements of the future. While outside the scope of the present analysis, future work could endeavor to explicitly determine whether the keywords present in a resultant scenario are quantitatively distinct from other scenarios. However, this would be challenging due to the short word count of the story scenarios, which are each between 1,500 and 2,500 words.
4.2 Comparison with narrative scenarios across the global Arctic
We find notable thematic overlap among various other narrative scenario efforts, sampled from research conducted around the global Arctic. In Table 3, we highlight some of these other scenarios, with corresponding descriptions of thematic overlap. The narrative scenarios highlighted in Table 3 provide a sample of the existing literature on the topic of the future of the Arctic region. While it is interesting that some of the scenarios that we have produced are thematically well-represented in the Arctic scenario literature (e.g., “Concession 60”, “Assisted Migration”), there is one that notably has no apparent representation in the existing literature.
“Putin’s Gambit” describes a world that has made tremendous global progress on climate change action and emissions reductions, except for Russia, where its politics have fostered continued fossil fuel exploration. From a scenario perspective, this is in large part due to Russia’s continued and projected reliance on fossil fuels as a major part of its economy (Ilinova et al., 2020; Keil, 2014). Thus, a contradiction emerges where despite global progress being made on the topic of emissions reduction, there is a significant aberration in the Russian economy. The brief thematic review in Table 3 suggests that this combination of themes may be under-represented in the existing scenario literature.