Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork data, this article argues there is tension between how Longyearbyen’s residents wish to perform as a community and hindrances the town inherited from its past and accepts as demarcation lines of Norway’s Svalbard politics. The population of Longyearbyen has undergone considerable change since the 1990s, turning from a predominantly Norwegian mining community into a highly diversified group of people from all over the world. This article places Longyearbyen into the wider context of settlements with similar traces (in Scandinavia, the Arctic, multilingual and immigrant communities worldwide, or in the context of extractivism) and discusses the existing barriers of communitification. Encounters with four participants illuminate the tensions and contradictions when it comes to cultivating social cohesion and shaping Longyearbyen’s “desired futures.” Unless the process of increasing the community’s agency is actively encouraged by people living there and those governing it from the outside, the future of the settlement risks being alienating for its inhabitants, weakening further the communitification potential.

En este trabajo se explora la organización de un taller de cerámica indígena ubicado en el interior de la provincia de Buenos Aires. Este taller fue impulsado por una familia que incursionó sobre técnicas de alfarería indígenas a partir del hallazgo fortuito de fragmentos de cerámica arqueológica. Desde un enfoque biográfico, analizamos las prácticas desplegadas en torno a la cerámica arqueológica que dieron lugar a procesos de memoria indígena. Luego, reflexionamos sobre la dimensión política de los procesos movilizados y el modo en que los mismos interpelan la gestión del patrimonio arqueológico local. A partir de ello se abordan las tensiones que configuran el saber científico académico respecto del patrimonio y la cerámica arqueológica. Con la presentación de este caso se busca aportar al debate sobre los múltiples procesos sociales que los objetos arqueológicos pueden movilizar a nivel local, involucrando una trama compleja de actores e instituciones.

As existing scholarship demonstrates, although the Chosŏn state (1392–1910) aimed to be a society “without litigation,” people understood the use of law and employed it to resolve various disputes in the local community. At the same time, a plethora of legal cases reveal that many parties chose alternative ways of airing their grievances rather than going directly to the local court. Centered on the eighteenth-century litigation over a case of attempted rape, this article examines the complex, multifaceted factors that influenced people's use of different strategies to appeal their justice at the local level. It asks what resources ordinary people in the late Chosŏn had in navigating legal conflicts, how they strategized over the choices they had, and why they finally exercised particular options when trying to win their cases. Investigating these questions, this article not only offers insights into the meaning of litigation that entailed strenuous document preparation to inscribe grievance, but also probes the impulses of individual actors in the legal terrain when attempting to achieve their goals through the dynamics of social interactions and existing resources in eighteenth-century Korea.

We analyze optimal budget allocations to acquire protected areas for carbon storage while balancing risk and return from protection under economic growth uncertainty in a local community. Our study is the first to explore how risk of uncertain economic growth affects cost of protected area acquisition using real estate values at the parcel level, enabling us to estimate the site-specific opportunity cost of carbon storage. The Pareto optimal trade-off frontier between the expected carbon storage benefit and its variance provides a continuum of risk-return combinations. The pattern of the trade-off relationship implies that risk mitigation is less costly in terms of foregone expected benefit when risk is higher than when it is lower. Our results also find that the difference in cluster-specific budget allocations between the strong economic growth scenario and the weak economic growth scenario subsequently decreases between the point of expected benefit maximization and the point of variance minimization. Our findings of optimal hectares of land for protected area acquisition for carbon storage and corresponding benefits and costs serve as an empirically informed knowledge base to help a local community prioritize acquisition of potential protected areas for carbon storage under economic growth uncertainty.

Invasive alien species can have widespread negative effects on native biodiversity. We investigated the prospects of engaging hunters in large-scale collaborative efforts to control non-native mink Neovison vison populations in Norway. We invited members of the Norwegian Association of Hunters and Anglers to complete an online questionnaire to ascertain their support for conservation and their level of effort to remove mink, in the context of hunting motivations and bounty payments. The general interest in mink control programmes was low but participants perceived the mink to be of conservation concern. Bounty payments influenced mink catches, with hunters who received payments catching a mean of 4.70 more individuals per hunter than those who did not receive payments (P < 0.001). Mink hunters who preferred to hunt alone and had no preference for hunting locally reportedly caught on average 1.87 more mink per hunter than those who preferred to hunt in company (P < 0.001). The majority of hunters preferred government-led programmes (47%), and investment in bounty programmes (52%) was their main recommendation to improve mink hunting. Hunters can be a valuable component of a mink removal task force and could decrease the likelihood of recolonization of mink in the buffer areas of core conservation target areas.