The Cooperative and Transformative Governance (CAT) Research Group contributes to the ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Grant project "Building Arctic Futures: Transport Infrastructures and Sustainable Northern Communities" (INFRANORTH) coordinated by the University of Vienna. The project focuses on how residents of the Arctic, both indigenous and non-indigenous, engage with new and upgraded infrastructures in the Arctic and examines the intended and unintended consequences infrastructure projects have on their lives.
In the framework of the INFRANORTH project, CAT researchers develop explorative scenarios of future infrastructure development in selected Arctic communities. These scenarios are customized for the three study regions of the project - the European Arctic (Denmark (including Greenland and the Faroe Islands), Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden), the North American Arctic (Canada and the USA), and the Russian Arctic. Furthermore, participatory modeling methods are used to co-develop normative scenarios of the study regions' development with local stakeholders from the following countries: Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the USA. These stakeholders include decision-makers responsible for infrastructure deployment and local communities affected by it. Finally, the normative scenarios are confronted with the exploratory scenarios to develop policies aiming at achieving the regional infrastructure visions under uncertainty.