ABSTRACT
To talk about ‘climate’ or ‘climate change’ is a relatively new concept within Greenlandic politics. The first climate strategy was introduced in 2009, eight years after Greenland ratified the Kyoto Protocol with Denmark. What is at the top of the agenda for the current government of Greenland is their promise to work to ensure ‘economic self-sustainability for Greenland’. This chapter aims at bringing climate change explicitly back into the conversation by confronting both the absence and presence of the concept, asking what should be sustained when discussing climate change and the future development in Greenland. Since the turn of the millennia, political actors in Greenland have actively and strategically positioned themselves towards local and global climate regimes. However, why is it that Greenland’s climate commitments have not really been properly formulated or consolidated? The primary focus in this chapter is on language and its capacity to make and shape politics, particularly by constructing and privileging scales when discussing climate change and sustainability in Greenland. The analytical work is concentrated around a few communicative events related to the slow becoming of Greenland’s climate policy. This study concludes that the ‘economic self-sustainability for Greenland’ offers one very local and situated perspective with Greenland at the centre of the world fighting for their right to sustainable development. Thus a scale-making which elegantly combines three different sustainability dreams for Greenland: (1) a sustainable economy (a national budget independent of Danish subsidies, based on private investments and the use of own resources); (2) a sustainable community (jobs, growth, regional development, and a new infrastructure); (3) a sustainable polity (a referendum leading to a sovereign Arctic nation state, able to represent itself in the UN and the Arctic Council).
