JUSTNORTH began in June 2020 during the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, making a bold decision to not postpone the project's start date. JUSTNORTH activities largely went as planned despite the ebbs and flows of the ongoing global pandemic, although many activities have been reconfigured through e-technologies--from team meetings to co-production and fieldwork. At present, all tasks and research teams are on schedule, submitting all deliverables on time.
The first major achievement of the project is in the work produced by the 'justice theory' team from the starting work package (WP1), preparing justice and ethics guidelines to be used by the rest of the project. This includes a justice handbook for the case study researchers, as well as materials that will help the integration team develop the JUSTscore negotiation tool and the legal scholars produce the recommendations to the EU for their next Arctic policy. The team has produced the JUSTNORTH Justice database, a literature database of scholarly works on justice and ethics (10.5281/zenodo.7254104) a JUSTNORTH Justice Podcast Series (10.5281/zenodo.7561807) and several publications on justice and the Arctic, including chapters in the edited volume Arctic Justice: Society, Environment and Governance (ISBN 978-1529224801)
The next major achievement is the completion of the 17 case studies (WP2-4) that studied existing economic activities in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Canada and Russia to identify the barriers, risks and costs of economic development and the benefits, opportunities and pathways toward just sustainable development. The case studies produced a strong set of data and results to be used by the integration team (WP5) in the development of the project's key deliverable, the negotiation tool JUSTscore. The case study results are also being used to inform recommendations for policy and decision-makers developed in WP6. While the fieldwork and early-stage analysis is finished, publications from this part of the project are just starting to emerge.
Some final achievement emerging in the last part of the project included a serious of policy and economic briefs related to Arctic policy, JUSTscore--a negotiation tool and finally, a project documentary.
JUSTNORTH is emerged as a collective research unit with established collaboration with other EU initiatives such as Polar Cluster and EU Polar Net, and the project leadership worked closely with these groups to maximise impact and exploitation of project outcomes, which are being shared via the project's website and stored for the long term in Zenodo.
