Introduction: Sustainability as a political concept in the Arctic

The introduction to the book presents the key ambition of the book, which is to posit sustainability as a political concept that redefines competing visions of the future for Arctic stakeholders. To begin, we present a brief historical background of the concept. The chapter, then, argues why discussions of how to achieve sustainability, and of whether the concept is positive or negative, fails to capture the political implications of sustainability. Instead we start from the empirical, or discursive, presence of sustainability and describe how it reconfigures the relationship between identity, space and time. This discussion is concluded with a framework for how to analyse sustainability as a political concept and this analytical strategy has been employed in the book: We have asked each contributor to consider the following questions in relation to their topic: What is to be sustained? In relation to what? How? Answering these questions allows us to discuss the contributions against our overall ambition.