- Move those who can’t contribute to economy

The research publication is written by political anthropologist Elena Nuykina at the Arctic Centre in Rovaniemi in Finnish Lapland.

Russian northern relocation projects stand for a policy which considers population groups as passive elements “moved by the state” due to economic, military and geopolitical interests. However, the study shows that proactive northern residents have their own strategies to seek better living conditions for themselves and their families, using creatively the state’s relocation programmes for their own interests.

As a part of the Arctic Centre’s anthropology research team project MOVE-INNOCOM, the research focuses on administrative migration assistance programs and their implementation results on two northern regions, Murmansk Oblast and Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (YNAO). Both programmes concentrate on residents of closing settlements, disabled, pensioners and non-working citizens, those who ‘create a burden on northern budgets.’ At the current stage, the resettlement process is carried out through a housing certificate scheme that allows people to choose a place of destination and type of housing.

- The important question arising from the regulatory perspective on demographic changes is: What population is ‘welcome’ to reside in the North and who should leave? The Russian government makes this distinction clear: those who cannot contribute to economic growth should be encouraged to move, Elena Nuykina says in the study.

Read also: Barents Russia still losing population

The attempts of the state to artificially ‘engineer’ the social structure did not meet its objective and caused an insignificant impact on either population change or northern development in general. The northern resettlement policy has not worked as it was initially aimed.

- Northerners rely on the state in helping them to resettle since it was the state that brought them to the North in the first place. However, when they get migration assistance in many cases beneficiaries use the subsidies for a different purpose. In practice, the decision to migrate is not simply planned in accordance with the logic of neo-classical economics. It includes determinants poorly considered by policy planners, such as accumulated social capital, personal experiences, and memories attaching people to the place.

Nuykina says that one option of bringing programmes closer to the target population would be through delegating the decisive power to the regions, allowing them to determine how the programme should function in their territory and adjusting relocation schemes according to the local context.

According to senior researcher Florian Stammler, coordinator of the Arctic Anthropology Research team, the study can be interpreted in the larger context:

- This work speaks to the inherent tension between laws that claim to be standardised throughout the whole country and valid for all citizens, and human practice on the ground, which has a sheer endless diversity to respond to such standardised models of development.