Placing northern development: The case of North Sweden

Abstract

There has been increasing attention paid in the regional economic literature to how local rural actors are being actively engaged in globalisation processes. The bulk of this literature is concerned with rural areas which are proximate to large urban centres and feature somewhat mixed economies. ‘Resource peripheries’ in places like the Arctic and sub-Arctic north of Europe and North America, South America and Australasia have received less attention. Resource peripheries are seen as inherently dependent on external agents who control economic activity and markets for resource commodities. This paper argues that an apparent diminution of local agency in the shaping of relational space in resource peripheries may be a result of no attempt to find such agency. The paper discusses the reconfiguring of northern economies within ‘relational space’ that has occurred over the past 10 or 20 years, using the case of the two northern-most counties in Sweden (Västerbotten and Norrbotten) as an illustrative example. The case demonstrates the layers of activity that occur within these regions (intra-regional) and between northern and distant regions (inter-regional). It argues that these activities may be both institutional (based on regulations and formal arrangements) and functional. By using the example of North Sweden, the paper introduces a conceptual framework, labelled ARTE, which provides a useful support for making sense of the multi-dimensional processes that contemporary northern development is engaged in.

Keywords

agglomeration Europeanisation globalisation local agency northern Sweden regionalisation resource peripheries translocalisation

Introduction

There has been an increasing concern with processes of economic ‘globalisation’ and their impacts on what were seen as previously local economic networks in rural areas. Of particular interest is the advances made in illustrating how local rural actors are being actively engaged in shaping globalisation processes. Concepts such as ‘glocalisation’ and ‘relational space’ have been used to demonstrate how the geography of economic development might change over time, and how local participation influences and is influenced by these geographies. Young (2010) among others has argued that local agency within relational space is a strong determinant of the economic development paths of rural localities over time.

Glocalisation and relational space in ‘resource peripheries’ in places like the Arctic and sub-Arctic north of Europe and North America, South America and Australasia have received much less attention in the academic literature (Barton, 2006; Barton and Fløysand, 2010; Hayter, 2003). This is most likely because resource peripheries are seen as inherently dependent on external agents who control economic activity and markets for resource commodities (Carson et al., 2011; Watkins, 2009). The relational space for these peripheries is seen as determined from the outside, with the ‘local’ subsumed. In this paper, we argue that an apparent diminution of local agency in the shaping of relational space in resource peripheries may be a result of few attempts to find such agency. As a result, regional and local development debates around resource peripheries may be based on poor understandings of how their economies actually work (or could work).

This paper is specifically set in the context of northern European resource peripheries, and consequently offers the ARTE framework (with Agglomeration, Regionalisation, Translocalisation and Europeanisation at its core) as an analytical tool for examining economic change in resource peripheries and revealing aspects of local agency which may hitherto have been overlooked. We show that contemporary northern development evolves essentially within these four relational spaces that came about as the intersections of two main dimensions of globalisation processes: one addressing the geographical extent of these processes, with the emergence of the intra-regional and inter-regional scales as privileged loci for local agency, and one addressing the relational mechanisms driving these changes, which is either functional or institutional in nature. In this framework, Agglomeration encompasses the functional processes that engage economic agents in new forms of relations and ventures at the regional scale; Regionalisation deals with processes that led to the emergence of the region as an arena for the development of new forms of institutions; Translocalisation addresses the reshaping of economic relations, often grounded in non-resource-based activities, that have emerged as a response to enhanced development opportunities beyond the locality; Europeanisation stresses the new arena for institutional change that the accession to the European Union and its institutions has provided to local and regional actors of Northern Sweden. Case examples are drawn from research in northern Sweden's inland, which is one of Europe's more sparsely populated areas and an economy dominated by resource extractive activities (forestry and mining). While the ‘Europeanisation’ element is somewhat specific to this context, the framework may be readily adapted to reflect other supra-national yet sub-global politico-economic structures around common markets, free trade agreements and other cooperative platforms in other parts of the world.

Relational space and rural development

Major contributions in human and economic geography have pinpointed the increasingly complex relationship between the spatial and socio-technical dimensions of rural development processes (Murdoch, 2006). This new perspective led geographers to advocate for a relational approach to space. Relational thinking rejects ‘forms of spatial totality’ (Jones, 2009: 491) according to which geographical boundaries can be drawn to encompass social and economic interactions. Rather, the debate on the relational space draws attention to the importance of external relations, based on new spatialities of social processes, in the constitution of place (Amin, 2007). The landscape for economic interactions is understood less as a mosaic of bounded and self-contained socio-economic systems, be them states, regions or localities, and more as a metamorphosing system of spatialities which may be essentially unbounded.

The idea of the relational space has been translated in rural studies as a way to ‘examine the capacity of rural localities to engage with and shape globalization processes’ (Woods, 2007: 492). Woods identifies the key processes by which globalisation processes affect rural development:

Globalization therefore involves the multiplication of social and economic networks that transcend traditional borders; the stretching of social and economic relations, activities and inter-dependencies over increasing distances; the intensification and acceleration of exchanges that are made across expanding distances in ever-less time and with increasing frequency; and the development of a global consciousness, in which people have a greater awareness of the world as a whole, and their place in it. (Woods, 2013: 113)

Woods conjectures that the relational space of the countryside has become more heterogeneous, i.e. rural actors establish and maintain relationships with a greater number and a wider range of other economic agents, more outward-looking, i.e. they do so not only in close proximity but also over longer distances, and more paced, i.e. with more frequent and faster interactions. These characteristics of relational space have been assisted by the emergence of the Internet and digital communication (Galloway et al., 2011), but also reflect the historical experience and capabilities of many rural activities. If mobility has long been a driver of societal change in rural areas (Milbourne and Kitchen, 2014), globalisation processes have exacerbated the scale and speed of this process which heightened the transformation of rural areas as transitional spaces.

Contingent to the perception of the weakening of the nation-state, the sub-national ‘region’ has emerged as the main locus of global competitiveness (Nijkamp, 2003; Storper, 1995). Jones (2009: 492) argued that relational thinking has been instrumental in promoting new theories of local and regional development, from being perceived as bounded socio-economic spaces, to being enmeshed in numerous and dense sets of relations. The emergence of the region as a coherent space for investigating socio-economic dynamics has led to an increased ‘regionalisation’ and rescaling of national policymaking towards the subnational level. Keating and Wilson (2014) identified two main drivers for this process. The first one is functional and corresponds more or less to the ‘new regionalism’ paradigm for which regions are not only seen as locations within which socio-economic development takes place, but rather as integrated production systems with strong internal interdependencies (Keating and Wilson, 2014: 840). The second driver relates to the acknowledgement of national diversity in terms of subnational identities (Keating and Wilson, 2014: 840). Both drivers necessitate differentiated approaches to policymaking in order to take into consideration these regional specificities. Through this, the regional level has emerged in contemporary policymaking as ‘an increasingly important locus of rurality’ (Richardson, 2000: 62).

The emerging discourses of European Spatial Development, spurred by the adoption of the European Spatial Development Perspective in 1999 and sustained by the successive Territorial Agendas, has often reduced the place of rural areas in the wider European territorial system to mere ‘shadow areas of urban–urban connectivity’ (Richardson, 2000: 58). This understanding was part of the ‘competition turn’ of EU Regional Policy supported by theoretical underpinnings arguing for the locational disadvantage of being located far away from the continent's major markets (Copus, 2001; Keeble et al., 1982), which meant a rather low level of market potential for these areas (Crone, 2012; Gløersen et al., 2006). At the same time, the implementation of European Territorial Cooperation programmes (e.g. Interreg) initiated new platforms for collaboration about development and planning issues outside the national arena. Europeanisation has therefore created the platform for new relationships and alliances between rural ‘others’ that maintain local institutions but to some extent bypass national ones (Jones, 2009). This institutional shift away from the national realm has also been promoted through the implementation of transnational, cross-border and inter-regional forms of cooperation. The regional actors are here again central in enacting this shift, although the focus is less on exerting influence and power than on promoting the diffusion of good practices and know-how between regions (Stead, 2012).

New institutional frontlines such as those created through the European project can be deemed as systemic because they affect an entire territorial system. However, Woods (2007) among others has argued that these exogenous processes are reconfigured and negotiated by and in local communities through place-specific contingencies. This point is central in the elaboration of our relational approach because it emphasises that the ins and outs of globalisation in the rural lie in understanding the interplay between macro and micro processes. The new relational spaces emerging from this interplay will thus give rise to diverse countrysides (Murdoch, 2003: 274). It is local agency within the realm of these exogenous drivers that tends to crystallise and exacerbate local diversity (Woods, 2007). Even within the apparent omniscient influence of globalisation, therefore, local actors can, under certain circumstances, become responsible agents. Those circumstances include, indeed depend upon, openness to external relations (Copus and De Lima, 2014; Shucksmith and Chapman, 1998; Woods, 2007).

This ‘open’ relational approach to characterising the local economy has been propounded by the theory of neoendogenous rural development. Torre define neoendogenous development as ‘a systemic or network approach […] highlighting the importance of the linking and bridging relations in development processes’ (2014: 667). Neoendogenous development theory indeed considers that the mobilisation of local resources and the need to incorporate extra-local factors requires local actors to share a common identity and the capability of working together (Bosworth and Atterton, 2012). In that respect, it can be conjectured that the varying ability for rural actors to grasp and benefit from these external relations is a determining factor in the growing development asymmetries observed among and within rural regions (Copus and De Lima, 2014; Shucksmith and Chapman, 1998; Woods, 2007). In summary, despite the threats of globalisation to local rural institutions, rural economies can become central actors in the configuration of relational spaces which ultimately increase their development potential. What the extensive literature on rural globalisation still lacks is a coherent and comprehensive analytical framework capturing how local agency relates to new windows of opportunity induced by wider processes of change.

Capturing neoendogenous northern development: Illustrations from Sweden's resource peripheries

Rural communities in Europe's ‘inner periphery’ (Podhrázská et al., 2015) have strong histories of local agency, with well-developed local political systems dominated by local farmers and businessmen, large proximate markets and proximity to regional and national political institutions (Woods, 2011). These potential assets have largely been absent in the more distant resource peripheries, where local politics has been heavily influenced by external forces, and where markets and political institutions are both distant and distanced from local actors and issues (Carson, 2011). Even when small firms in resource peripheries attempt to ‘reach out’ to global relations, distant markets are deemed tenuous, asymmetrical and too demanding in terms of internal managerial resources to be sustained over a longer period of time (Young, 2010). Nevertheless, the engagement of resource peripheries in global economies is by no means new, and in fact has been a determining feature of their development. Local agency is seen as potentially important in the ever growing competition among resource peripheries to attract flows of different kinds, such as investments, workers or tourists (Malecki, 2007), which can help mediate the impact of the booms and busts which arise from externally focussed resource industries (Wellstead, 2007).

Understanding how local agency might emerge and bring advantages to resource peripheries is consequently an important goal for regional development researchers and practitioners. On that basis, this paper introduces a framework for analysing the context for relational space making and neoendogenous development in (European) resource peripheries. The framework is drawn from the rural development literature discussed above, and observations of processes of globalisation and glocalisation in northern Sweden.

Evolution of urban–rural relations in the North

The last couple of decades have seen a steady polarisation of the settlement structure, and consequently the economic centres of power, in Sweden. This polarisation can be witnessed on three different geographical scales. At the scale of the country, the three largest agglomerations of the south, i.e. Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö, have grown at a faster pace than the rest of the country. In the northern half of country (Norrland – comprising the four northernmost counties – see Figure 1), a few urban centres bordering the Gulf of Bothnia, i.e. Umeå, Luleå or Sundsvall, have grown rapidly. In the inland, population has steadily withdrawn to municipal capitals, along with many basic health and social services. The larger urban centres in the first two categories are well endowed in knowledge-intensive amenities such as universities, research centres and generally well performing service and technological industries. The agglomeration process in Norrland has led to the north becoming simultaneously more urbanised and more sparsely populated (Wiberg, 2004).

Figure 1.

Map of Sweden highlighting the four northern counties and municipalities. Source: Länsstyrelserna (www.extra.lansstyrelsen.se/gis/Sv/Pages/default.aspx).

These multiple processes have led to the reconfiguration of the regional economy of the Swedish North. Traditionally, the place of northern development within the wider Swedish economy and welfare system has been essentially about capitalizing on the country's natural assets through resource extraction and processing industries. This is applicable to the inland parts of Norrland. By the same token, the coastal areas of Swedish North were, since the 1960s, acting essentially as logistical gateways for these industries and service centres for the regional population. In short, Swedish northern development from the middle part of the 20th revolved around a division of labour between a primary-industry-focused inland, generating high levels of revenues and wealth for the region and the country at large, and service-intensive coastal areas accommodating the side effects of this growth for the wider regional population. Different economic dynamics have appeared recently. Access to raw material and access to a large customer base have traditionally identified as the main drivers for the localisation of primary and tertiary industries, respectively. The localisation of secondary industries, on the other hand, is the result of a more fragile equilibrium between these two drivers, i.e. one that is the most likely to evolve over time as a result of macro-economic changes (i.e. globalisation). In the Swedish North, secondary industries in Norrland were located essentially in close vicinity of the extractive industries, i.e. close to the raw material that it ought to process. This has resulted in a dense network of small manufacturing firms located in localities along the inland railway corridor connecting Kiruna to Östersund. However, recent trends show that, while the small manufacturing firms of the Swedish North have, overall, grown faster than the ones in the rest of the country, ‘urban’ small manufacturing firms in the region have themselves outperformed their ‘non-urban’ counterparts (Dubois, 2015). In 2010, the combined production of urban small manufacturing firms was equal to that of non-urban ones. The extrapolation of the trend leads us to conjecture that ‘urban’ centres will soon become the primary sites of the secondary industry of the Swedish North. It may be posited that this spatial reconfiguration of the regional economic structure may have been triggered by the increased level of international competition necessitating the development of high added value and technically and technologically more advanced manufacturing products meaning that the manufacturing sector would gain more from being located closer to knowledge centres than to commodity producers.

Despite the threat that these processes will lead to the northern inland becoming once again mere sites of resource extraction, research has shown that new forms of local development based on alternative ways to exploit the abundant natural capital have emerged. At the turn of the century, Johansson and Stenbacka (2001) could already identify ‘pockets’ of positive population change in northern Sweden, which often were contingent on the blossoming of the tourism industry or activities based on the exploitation of natural resources, especially mining. Tourism ‘hot spots’ such as Åre in Sweden are still the most dynamic small settlements in the Swedish North in demographic and economic terms. Creative and knowledge-intensive industries are increasingly present in the economic fabric of resource peripheries as a result of the increasing flows (both in and out) of persons and capital resulting from tourism. Brouder (2012), for instance, talked about ‘creative outposts’ as tourism often acts as a catalyst for innovative local development and helps regenerate the (depleting) local social capital. A recent study in the old mining region of Bergslagen, at the southern edge of north Sweden, demonstrated that self-employed in-migrants are usually more active in other sectors of the economy than the locals (Hedfeldt and Lundmark, 2015). The study concluded that both in-migration and return migration, i.e. the backflow of persons who have emigrated during the course of their working life from resource peripheries to other places, had a positive, significant and substantial effect on the vitality of the local entrepreneurial behaviour (Hedfeldt and Lundmark, 2015).

The becoming of a ‘region’

The ‘region’ has not historically been an important level in the Swedish policymaking system as it was constructed around a strong national level combined with strong local authorities (290 municipalities) with rather clear-cut responsibilities between them (Hörnström, 2013). In the field of spatial planning, local authorities enjoy a large autonomy. In the contemporary Swedish planning system, the ‘regional level’ consisted of 21 Counties. Each county has two separate entities intervening in regional development processes. The County Administrative Boards (länsstyrelse in Swedish) are non-elected authorities appointed by the State in order to act as its decentralised offices for implementing national policies at the County level. The County Administrative Boards have been granted the prerogative of elaborating and implementing regional development plans (Hörnström, 2013: 430). The County Councils (landsting in Swedish) are elected bodies that have a much narrower role in regional planning with prerogatives essentially focused on delivering transportation and health care services. However, there have been long-standing debates about a possible evolution of the role and shape of the regional level in Sweden.

Much of the ongoing debate has focused on identifying the ‘optimal’ number and geographical extent of new Swedish regional entities based on amalgamations of current counties. Formal amalgamation of the four northern counties is proposed over the next three years In the meantime, while new public institutions combining länsstyrelse and landsting have been formed in most Swedish counties, the two northernmost counties of Norrbotten and Västerbotten have adopted alternative structures. In Norrbotten, a new Regional body will be created by the takeover of regional development duties of the County Administrative Board (länsstyrelse) by the County Council (landsting) starting in 2017 (SKL, 2016). In Västerbotten, on the other hand, the regional development duties have been transferred to the regional association ‘Region Västerbotten’ which is a ‘confederation’ of the 15 municipalities of the county. This decentralisation of the elaboration and implementation of regional development policies to regional actors means that, for the first time in Sweden, regional bodies in the Swedish North hold a sufficiently broad spectrum of responsibilities, from economic growth to local transportation to provision of services, to effectively influence the future of northern development. However, the two ‘models’ of regionalisation adopted by Norrbotten and Västerbotten lead to two different geographies of power within the region, and especially the balance between inland municipalities, the historical places of northern development based on extraction of natural resources and the coastal regional centres, the preferred sites of contemporary and future northern development based on knowledge and innovation. This is a big shift of the regional policymaking landscape because inland communities have traditionally been wary of their relation towards the regional centres. In the case of Norrbotten, the concentration of regional development prerogatives under a single regional entity will likely accentuate the weight of the regional centre, Luleå, in future territorial development trends. In the case of Västerbotten, as regional development issues will be steered jointly by all county municipalities under the umbrella of Region Västerbotten, the transition is more likely to necessitate a more open dialogue and consensus between development actors, including public and private, between Umeå and its geographical surroundings. Hence, the two different routes to regionalisation undertaken in the Swedish North are likely to lead to the unfolding of different modes of northern development, and not the least with respect to their geographical manifestation.

Engaging the global economy

Sweden is a small country with an abundance of ‘global’ commodities, making the Swedish economy open to international flows of capital, goods and knowledge. In the resource peripheries of the Swedish North, internationalisation has essentially been the (almost exclusive) privilege of a few actors in the commodity extraction business. This way of engaging in the global economy is fairly typical from other places of northern development in North America and Australia. However, these global commodities were historically operated by large state-owned companies. New operators from other mining countries, such as Australia and Canada, have appeared in the regional economic landscape, whereas state-owned mining corporations have opened up their governance and ownership structures, for instance through company mergers and acquisitions (Knobblock, 2013). This creates new forms of interdependencies, especially in the form of capital and influence, between key economic actors of the Swedish North and other places. This has also led to new patterns of labour mobilities to and from resource peripheries, with varying temporalities and spatialities (e.g. fly-in, fly-out or seasonal work). In the case of Northern Sweden, Knobblock and Pettersson (2010) showed that through outsourcing, companies outside the traditional mining industry have provided mining companies with labour for performing core mining activities which has promoted the development of a more diverse local economy even in localities where mining is still dominant. It has also triggered possibilities for small firms serving such industries to develop service solutions that can be exported globally or be applied in other industries. This changes drastically the rather ‘symbiotic’ relationship that historically came about in resource peripheries between the extractive industry and the local community: operators invested heavily in social amenities increasing the quality of life whereas the community provided them with a stable and productive labour force. In light of the new patterns of labour mobilities, there are few incentives for extractive industries to become engaged in the long-term development of these communities.

The place of globalisation in shaping northern development has become simultaneously more diffuse and more present. Because large operators tend to dominate the outreaching channels of the local economy of resource peripheries, the participation in extra-local economies of local economic agents is tenuous and unstable and achieved through a handful of relationships that are not reciprocated (Young, 2010). Recent studies have showed that new modes of economic globalisation, taking the forms of increased translocal linkages and bypassing these structural constraints, are emerging in the Swedish North. Translocalisation differs from internationalisation in the sense that extra-local relations are not based solely on economic transactions but also involve collaborative arrangements. Unlike the narrow ‘relational route’ portrayed by Young (2010), translocal embeddedness is performed through a larger number of small (from a transactional point of view), but trustful relations with actors that have somehow similar positions in their respective value chains (Dubois, 2016). This leads to the emergence of a wider network of reciprocal relations that make the firm less vulnerable to the evolution of single relations. Hence, small firms in the Swedish North may be able to penetrate international markets through social skills such as trust and reputation (Dubois, 2015). In another study, Hedberg (2013) documented the integration of the Swedish wild berry industry into a global commodity chain (GCC) with increasing competition between merchants, delivering mass volumes of berries to the world market. Key to this integration was the labour mobility of international workers, in this case Thai women, to these areas to compensate for the lack of interest of the local workforce in such tasks. These new economic relations between the Swedish North and these other places are also brokered through socializing. Indeed, Webster and Haandrikman (2016) showed that the migration of Thai women for marriage is a complicated negotiation between the individual and social structures. So even at the very personal level macro processes are very much entwined into how personal decisions are made. Finally, Eimermann (2014) raised another important side of this translocalisation process. Investigating the recent migration of Dutch people to a former resource periphery of middle Sweden, Bergslagen, he concluded that the fluctuating relationship that the lifestyle migrants entertain with both their place of origin and their new settling place is complex. This contributes in creating a sense of place in the former resource periphery that is constantly benchmarked with what the migrants left behind when moving and thus shaped through this cognitive tension between two distant places.

Engaging the European construction

As Sweden became a member of the European Union in 1995, together with Finland and Austria, the institutional context has drastically changed at both national and regional level, especially through Cohesion policy and the Single Market. Policy integration in the EU is as much about politics and power as it is about rational policymaking (Richardson, 2000: 56). Europeanisation as a policy process is strongly associated with the notion of territoriality which touches upon the extensive question of the future shape and contours of the European territory as a political, institutional and socio-economic space (Fritsch, 2010). This territorialisation process entails a politically laden visioning of how the European space should become more integrated through stronger relations between its territories, as well as vis-à-vis its relations to its surrounding neighbourhood (Fritsch, 2009). Hence, Europeanisation has induced a repositioning of European territories within a wider context through new forms of social, economic and institutional relations with other territories across jurisdictional boundaries.

For the Swedish North, a critical moment was the adoption of territorial cohesion as an overarching objective of the whole EU. The debate on territorial cohesion has enabled to move away from the perception of geographic specificity, such as being sparsely populated, as a ‘handicap’ for territorial development to being considered a potential asset that need to be harnessed (GEOSPECS, 2012: 71). This new discourse about territoriality triggered by Europeanisation has seemingly reconnected issues of northern development within a wider institutional context and making them instrumental in achieving the overarching objectives set up by the EU. This discursive shift was also accompanied by the emergence of new practices in spatial planning and regional policymaking transcending traditional jurisdictional borders (Adshead, 2013; Böhme and Waterhout, 2007). Peer-to-peer exchanges in policymaking taking place among cross-border and transnational areas contribute to transnational learning and lead to improvements in policy and practice (2012: 104). This means that stakeholders from different regions are enmeshed in new forms of institutional processes that connect them ‘sideways’ to actors having similar positions in other (similar) regions. In that sense, Europeanisation can be understood as a dual process of widening and deepening of the institutional space of a territory ‘in patches’.

In the Swedish North, Europeanisation has provided the regional actors new arenas for collegially voicing their ideas, concerns and prospects about future territorial development in their region and reviving their ability to take concrete actions through cross-border and transnational cooperation in order to implement that vision. One interesting manifestation of how regional actors have seized such an opportunity through Europeanisation is the establishment of the NSPA¹ network, a cooperation between regional authorities of Northern and Eastern Finland, Northern Norway and Northern Sweden, i.e. between the regions of Europe directly concerned by the issue of ‘northern development’. The network is an effort to jointly promote the interests of the NSPA by instituting a direct dialogue between the regions and Brussels, i.e. the main EU institutions such as the Commission, the Committee of the Regions or the European Parliament, by bypassing the relative inertia of national authorities. The regions have also been very proactive in implementing new models for regional development policies propounded by the EU, such as Smart Specialisation (Teräs et al., 2015), in order to show ‘northern development’ may be related to wider European policies and thus making it a European concern rather than a mere national, regional or local one. This Europeanisation process is undertaken as a mishmash of a multitude of collaborative initiatives which creates a complex enmeshment of new institutional relations. The coherence of this widened institutional context is to serve as external resources of information and experiences that local and regional actors may tap into in order to solve concrete local development issues.

Discussion

By using the case of the Swedish North, this paper describes the increasingly complex nature and spatiality of local development processes that occur in resource peripheries. Because it was bounded to a fixed natural resource, historical northern development appeared as pockets of development that were strongly disconnected, both geographically and functionally, from their immediate surroundings. The tacit rule in northern development was straightforward trade-off: in exchange for the right to exploit the natural resources, the operators invested in the local social life through the building of amenities and services. Although the raw material itself was exported to the rest of Sweden and abroad, place-making in historical northern development resulted in somehow localised forms of interactions. Although strongly internationalised, what was driving northern development then was essentially the national interest rather than market forces.

What we have illustrated above is that contemporary northern development is the entanglement of multiple streams of social and economic relations across distances and the creation of a patchwork of new institutional landscapes that support the establishment of trustful relations between actors far away from their ‘home base’. Contemporary northern development means that the production of place in resource peripheries should be increasingly understood as the ‘intersection of trajectories’ (Massey, 2003: 111) and their subsequent reappropriation by local actors. These ideas have been at the centre of rural globalisation research for about a decade, and the added value of the present research needs to go beyond this factual evaluation. Our standpoint in the matter is that, while extensive, the literature on rural globalisation has not, to date, provided coherent and comprehensive analytical framings capturing how local agency ‘hop on’ to these trajectories and grasp the new windows of opportunity induced by their participation in wider processes of change. In order to fill this gap, we propose to structure our analytical framing along two main axes.

The first axis deals with the spatiality of the relational processes at stake. Although the distances across which these relations are now performed vary greatly, we deem that the flows of knowledge, goods, capital and persons emerging from resource peripheries follow two main spatial logics: intra-regional and inter-regional. Intra-regional processes come about essentially through new forms of interdependencies between resource peripheries and the regional centres, such as labour mobility, recreation activities and provision of services. But it is also performed through new forms of collaboration between local and regional actors in resource peripheries, e.g. inland localities in the Swedish North, in order to jointly address common development concerns and more efficiently pool their resources. Inter-regional processes are not only transnational, i.e. by reaching out outside of national borders, they tend also to connect the Swedish North with ‘peer’ regions in other countries making this outreaching process more targeted and embedded into distant socio-economic and institutional contexts. Actors in these ‘peer’ regions can be characterised as geographically distant, but cognitively close.

The second axis addresses the nature of the relational process at play. It distinguishes between relational mechanisms that are primarily institutional, i.e. linked to the establishment of new practices, values or norms, and those that are primarily functional, i.e. related to tangible (goods, persons) and intangible (capital, knowledge) flows. The literature in economic geography has indeed thoroughly discussed the role of institutions in economic development (Bathelt and Glückler, 2013; Gertler, 2010; Rodríguez-Pose, 2013). Institutions function as a way to connect individual behaviour and collective action leading to reduced uncertainty in developing social and economic relations (Bathelt and Glückler, 2013: 346). The works of institutions do not imply that all actors belonging to the same institutional context will evolve in the same way. There is indeed ‘little evidence showing that agents act and perform the same when subject to the same institutions’ (Boschma and Frenken, 2011: 302). But institutions act as a resource that different actors may freely mobilise and activate in order to suit their own development path. So, it is important to note that we do not claim that institutional and functional processes are fundamentally disconnected from one another. Our argument is that, for the sake of clarity, it may be valuable to analyse them separately at first in order to understand their own relational logic before being able to ‘reconnect’ them with each other.

Four fields for understanding the relational mechanisms inherent to globalisation emerge from the intersection of these two axes (see Figure 2). Agglomeration corresponds to functional processes taking place within the region, Regionalisation relates to the new institutional and policy arrangements witnessed within the region, Translocation correspond to the functional processes that take place across regional and national boundaries and Europeanisation corresponds to the establishment of new institutional frontiers beyond the regional realm.

Figure 2.

The A.R.T.E. framework.

These four fields do not represent self-contained mechanisms; they are just the most obvious manifestations of new forms of socio-spatial mechanisms underway under the umbrella of globalisation. What the ARTE framework does is to allow the possibility of understanding how processes taking place essentially within these fields interact with processes across the fields at different stages of territorial development.

An evident reading of the framework would be to associate functional and institutional processes taking place at the same scale, i.e. by looking at how the agglomeration–regionalisation or translocalisation–Europeanisation pairs brings into coherence what is taking place at the intra-regional and extra-regional scales, respectively. A second stage of analysis would then explore how these two pairs interplay with one another. However, it is not given at all that functional and institutional processes occurring at the same scale would de facto reinforce each other. Herrschel (2009: 244), discussing the embracement of ‘new regionalism’ as a main avenue to regionalisation, wondered if it will undermine or strengthen ‘the coherence and contiguity of regional spaces’. In the same fashion, starting by assuming that functional and institutional processes across scales are prominent, i.e. by looking at the agglomeration–translocalisation and regionalisation–Europeanisation pairs, would lead to valuable insights on how the ‘economy’ and institutions unfold across geographical scales.

The observations from the Swedish North though consolidate our understanding that there cannot be a clear-cut delineation of the spatialities of institutional and functional processes emerging from globalisation. Typically the functional processes have a wider spatial outreach and are more about connecting dots (i.e. more or less distant actors) than connecting the interstices in-between. Pushing institutional barriers, on the other hand, requires the establishment of trust which can be a lengthy process. The expansion of institutional spaces is thus still very much constrained by jurisdictional boundaries. In that sense the expansion of the institutional landscape, as illustrated by the case of the Swedish North, can be characterised as occurring ‘in patches’, within a wider jigsaw puzzle. As all puzzle-lovers know, sometimes these patches may appear in clusters that a priori disconnected from the central cluster. The geographical expansion of the institutional landscape is that increasingly actors seem to engage with other actors at the same level in the territorial (urban with urban, rural with rural and so on) hierarchy.

Hence, it becomes evident that more research is needed for understanding how relational mechanisms inherent to each field contribute to processes in other fields. Here we see two main avenues. First of all, because we are talking essentially about local agency, it seems crucial to understand what specific agent, whether it is an organisation or an individual, in the locality or region seemed to play a leading role in brokering the back-and-forth interplays between these fields and thus ‘reconnecting’ these processes. In that sense, the local agency of other actors is strongly influenced by their ability to develop a strong relation with this specific agent. Second, the interplay between the fields may not be unfolding continuously in time. Our hypothesis is that the interplays between the four fields occur at different moments of the development processes. Hence, the ARTE framework ought to be combined with an evolutionary approach in order to provide a better understanding of when and how actors mobilise institutional resources to develop functional ties across distance. In that sense, the interplay between the four fields is portrayed as a continuous process of relational mix and match occurring at different stages of development.

As a final point, the reader may have noticed that an important lubricant of these macro processes, namely national politics, is left aside from the framework. The main reason for this is that national politics can often be characterised as being subject to a strong inertia. In the Swedish case that we rely heavily upon in this paper, the relative inertia is embodied by the ‘political rhetoric’ (Nilsson and Lundgren, 2015) that still sees the periphery as a ‘problem’. Nilsson and Lundgren (2015) further pinpointed that it is not the intrinsic qualities of the Swedish North that are the main problem, but rather the shift in values of the rest of the Swedish society and their affective relations towards the periphery that seems to be the main reason for inertia. Whereas open landscapes, abundance of natural resources and cultural heritage are still valued by most Swedes, they have become less central compared to the attraction of urban lifestyles, the blossoming of the knowledge economy and the place of digital technologies in everyday life that have become much more valued.

Conclusions

This paper uses the specific case of northern development in Sweden to develop a novel analytical framework for investigating how local agency is shaped through globalisation processes. It identifies four main fields within which previous research about territorial development and globalisation has traditionally focused upon. The goal of the framework is to go beyond this categorisation and support future endeavours to elucidate the complex interplay between processes taking place within each field.

Although it is the authors’ understanding that this analytical framework may be used to investigate local development from a wide spectrum of geographical cases, the use of the case of northern development is particularly valuable because it illustrates well the transition from an ‘old’ globalisation paradigm, based on domination and dependency, to a ‘new’ one based on enhanced resilience and interdependencies. What makes it even more interesting is that the transition between the old and new paradigms is not about the new one does not replace the ‘old’ one; it is more about understanding how these two paradigms may co-evolve and lead to an enhanced ability of the multitude of actors in those regions to muddle through globalisation and promote development for the community.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

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