INTRODUCTION Nordic political ecologies

The purpose of this special issue is to demonstrate the relevance of political ecology for the study of Nordic environmental governance. As political ecology has gained a leading position in international environmental geography, Nordic geographers have increasingly been attracted to this approach. Although many have carried out political ecology research in the Global South, there has been little Nordic political ecology research at ‘home’. The contributions to this special issue demonstrate that the themes emerging in Nordic political ecology are familiar from research in developing countries, whether discussing tensions between rural or indigenous people and the state, contested environmental knowledge and how the state relates to such contestations, or prevailing discourses of sustainable land use. The Nordic context also represents a unique potential for political ecology scholarship, for at least two reasons. First, the Nordic landscape tradition suggests a potentially useful bridge between political ecology and land change science. Second, the emergence of the Arctic as a resource frontier and a geopolitical target area represents a potential comparative advantage of Nordic political ecology. This frontier is just as dynamic, environmentally and politically, as any other frontier of resource exploitation.