Resilience, vulnerability and adaptation in reindeer herding communities in the Finnish-Swedish border area

Abstract

In socio-ecological research, the focus and the conceptual grounding as well as the scales of analysis have shifted several times in recent decades between global and local dynamics and the general rules of evolution and specific local adaptations. Nowadays, the main paradigm emphasises the embeddedness of socio-ecological systems and conceptual tools for studying complex and dynamic systems have been emerging around the concepts of resilience, vulnerability and adaptive capacity. These concepts emphasise the adaptive nature of human societies in general via cultural means such as available new technologies, but they also refer to a political fact that specific societies, livelihoods and individuals are not equal in their possibilities for adaptation and not all means for adaptation are politically allowed or economically available for all people. In this article we provide a brief overview to the key problematic of adaptation from a local reindeer herding perspective in the border area of Finland and Sweden. We investigate how climate change adaptation issues are intertwined with a multitude of other forms of land use and challenges, but which nonetheless influence the resilience, vulnerability and adaptive capacity of local communities.