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A changing environment
The Norwegian Barents Secretariat’s grant programme is bilateral Norwegian-Russian but forms part of a wider cooperation within the Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR) including Finnish and Swedish regions. BEAR was established in a period of widespread worries Russia would destabilize and that consequences at the highly militarized Norwegian-Russian border would be disastrous. Also, the dramatic differences in living conditions between the Nordic and Russian regions in the North was considered a challenge. Regional cooperation across the borders was seen as being conducive to bridging the gap and thereby to stabilization. Three key words characterized the approach to cross-border activities: normalization, civilization and regionalization (Hønneland og Jensen 2008:11). The bilateral people-to-people cooperation enabled by the Norwegian Barents Secretariat’s grant programme fits into this approach. People-to-people initiatives were underpinned by historical narratives emphasizing the mutual contacts that once had existed. The pomor trade (exchange of Russian flour with Norwegian fish from around 1740 to around 1920) figured most prominently in this regard. Feelings of a common Northerner lifestyle and mentality were also evoked, and so was pride in living in an internationally important cross-border region. This could be summed up as cross-border “region-building”, constructing a regional identity for the inhabitants of the region based on a portrayal of the region as a natural unity with its inhabitants being “insiders” (Hønneland 2017:31). All this was conducive to engaging actors on both sides of the border. Today, real and contemporary commonalities in the North have partly replaced the pomor rhetoric as a rallying point. This may be challenges of municipal infrastructure under harsh climatic conditions, outmigration and poor infrastructure. Nonetheless, the idea of a special Northerner approach to cross-border cooperation prevails as illustrated by the following statements by project owners interviewed in the evaluation: “When politicians in Oslo make decisions, they do not always understand what we do and the importance of it” and “The fear of Russia hangs on from Trøndelag and southwards”. On the Russian side, the initiative to establish a Barents Euro-Arctic Region in the early 1990s was welcomed by regional authorities who saw an opportunity to get hold of financial and humanitarian support from the Nordic countries during the economic collapse that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Also in academic and cultural circles the opening up for foreign contacts was welcomed. On the other hand, the security apparatus and the military-industrial complex were reluctant (Holtsmark 2015: 616-17). Soon, obstacles to cooperation made their appearance. Some of the obstacles were due to misconceptions of each other. As pointed out by Geir Hønneland (2017:39) the idea that “Northernness alone gave an intuitive feeling of how the others thought” proved to be an over-simplification. The inhabitants on the two sides of the border had for centuries lived in different cultural spheres. Many cross-border projects encountered communicative barriers. Moreover, many Norwegians applied a humanitarian approach long after Russia recovered from the crises of the 1990s. This lag was often taken as condescension by Russian partners. Later, Norwegian governments have launched High North strategies since 2006 and intensified its efforts in circumpolar cooperation, all of which is of relevance for the regions forming part of the Barents Region and make the region only one of the platforms for crossborder cooperation.
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