This paper examines how science has been employed to establish, maintain, and contest senses of belonging on Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago administered by Norway since 1925 under an international treaty. The central argument is that the process of constructing Svalbard as a space belonging to Norway has long been intertwined with the processes of describing and representing the archipelago, and that participating in those processes has also permitted other states to articulate their own narratives of belonging— on Svalbard in particular and in the Arctic more generally. The concept of belonging is deployed to capture a sense of legitimate presence and stakeholdership that we do not believe can be adequately captured by the narrow concept of sovereignty. The article explores Norway’s historic and current use of science to validate (and even naturalize) its rule over Svalbard. At the same time, we argue that other states use science on Svalbard to articulate geopolitical scripts that portray them as stakeholders in an Arctic that is of trans-regional relevance due to the teleconnected effects of climate change.

While some of the future impacts of global environmental change such as some aspects of climate change can be projected and prepared for in advance, other effects are likely to surface as surprises - that is situations in which the behaviour in a system, or across systems, differs qualitatively from expectations. Here we analyse a set of institutional and political leadership challenges posed by 'cascading' ecological crises: abrupt ecological changes that propagate into societal crises that move through systems and spatial scales. We illustrate their underlying social and ecological drivers, and a range of institutional and political leadership challenges, which have been insufficiently elaborated by either crisis management researchers or institutional scholars. We conclude that even though these sorts of crises have parallels to other contingencies, there are a number of major differences resulting from the combination of a lack of early warnings, abrupt ecological change, and the mismatch between decision-making capabilities and the cross-scale dynamics of social-ecological change.

This article examines and qualifies the proposition that humankind’s recently acquired geological agency has brought about the convergence of Earth and human history. Contrasting a contemporary representation of human–nature interactions – the ‘Great Acceleration graphs’ documenting humanity’s post-war dominance – with an earlier perspective elaborated by Fernand Braudel, whose historical philosophy assigned physical geography powerful agency over human affairs, this article contends that ‘environmental crisis’ is a valid characterization of the post-1950 reordering of human–nature relations. Yet it is not a ‘proper’ crisis, as the environmental and climate crisis cannot be managed as a discrete event – as crises are often thought of today – in hope of restoring the status quo ante. Drawing on an older connotation of crisis, this article proposes a temporal conceptualization of environmental crisis, signifying a multi-decade historical period of reordering that spans the decline of the Holocene and advent of the Anthropocene. The intended and unintended consequences of human decisions will determine whether convergence, through reflexivity or coercion, results from this ongoing epochal transition.