Establishing a Culturally and Environmentally Sensitive Arctic Tourism

Graham Huggan and Roger Norum

School of English

Impact summary

This case study enabled a range of tourism providers and users to develop greater cultural sensitivity and environmental responsibility through ‘slow’ (small-scale, low impact) travel and used the medium of the creative arts to raise public social and environmental awareness of the Arctic region. Produced as part of a wider, international project, entitled ‘Arctic Encounters’, funded by the HERA network, research by Professor Graham Huggan and Dr Roger Norum directly influenced the marketing strategies of two project partner organisations, Yorkshire-based ‘slow travel’ company Inntravel, and the national tourism board Visit Greenland.

Huggan and Norum collaborated closely with Inntravel, resulting in

• a re-assessment of, and consequent adjustment to, the environmental implications of their holiday portfolio in the European High North (including Iceland and Norway)
• a rise in passenger numbers choosing the Arctic as a holiday destination and subsequent economic uplift
• the means to develop more culturally sensitive promotional materials, with Inntravel now using articles and images created by the ‘Arctic Encounters’ team (including Huggan and Norum) in magazines, brochures and social media outlets.

The project’s partnership with Visit Greenland enabled the organisation to refocus its strategy towards responsible forms of tourism that involve local people, preserve natural and cultural heritage, and reduce the risk of social and environmental damage.

Huggan and Norum’s research underpinned new creative outputs and activities that raised public awareness about how to develop more environmentally and culturally sensitive representations of the Arctic region in travel writing and within the tourism industry. Their research also informed a series of screenings and discussions during ‘Arctic Cinema Week’, part of the 2015 Leeds International Film Festival, a major annual event that attracts more than 40,000 visitors. 

Underpinning research

The impact generated in this case study was rooted in research undertaken by Huggan and Norum as part of the ‘Arctic Encounters’ project. Drawing on an innovative suite of interdisciplinary methods designed by Huggan, the project combined postcolonial studies, environmental studies and tourism studies to generate up-to-the-minute insights into Arctic tourism, which is developing rapidly, but not always in sustainable ways that are sufficiently attuned to social and environmental change.

Huggan’s research, including the book (co-edited with Lars Jensen) Postcolonial Perspectives on the European High North: Unscrambling the Arctic, demonstrated that while the Arctic is nominally a ‘postcolonial’ space today, colonial ways of seeing and interpreting the region linger. To some degree, these residually colonialist understandings persist in touristic representations of the region, and while the contemporary Arctic tourism industries are more socially and environmentally responsible than they used to be, some still tend to rely on tired travel stereotypes that bear the marks of the region’s not always properly differentiated colonial past.

Fieldwork by Norum, a social anthropologist, further confirmed these findings, but also demonstrated new, emerging forms of tourism – especially ecotourism and indigenous tourism – which indicate a more socially inclusive, environmentally sustainable approach to the region, with cultural and economic benefits for the local communities concerned. Norum’s expertise in tourism in the European High North resulted in his being commissioned by travel publisher Brandt to publish a commercial guidebook on Svalbard.