After a record number of applications, twenty five young talents from across the world came to Bodø for the fourth High North Dialogue Academy.
This year the program made room for something it had not offered before: a workshop on how to reach the people who make policy.
The workshop was led by Jennifer Spence, director of the Arctic Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. She walked the group through how to develop a policy idea and get it across to the people who make the decisions.
– The policy communication workshop was especially interesting, says Natalie Smith, from Trent University in Ontario, Canada. One of the participants this year.
The organisers plan to run more skills-focused sessions like this in the future.
Four scenarios for the Arctic 2050
The workshop was a part of an otherwise packed week. A core exercise of the HND Academy is scenario planning, a method taught at Nord University for years and used across politics, security and the energy sector to discover what might lie in the future.
The participants were split into groups and created four scenarios for what the Arctic might look like in 2050, work that began with a Monday workshop led by Roman Vakulchuk, head of the climate and energy research group at NUPI. On the final day the groups presented their futures to a jury of Arctic experts: Federica Eyja Scarpa, Martin Koss and Petter Nore.
– Developing my own group presentation on what the Arctic will look like in 2050, I learned so much about resilience, entrepreneurship and governance, says Smith.
Redesigning a piece of Bodø
Innovation ran through the rest of the program.
A workshop led by Cem Kayatekin from IE University, with Matthew Sorola from Toulouse University and Evgenii Aleksandrov from Nord University, tested the groups with a hands-on task: redesigning a neighbourhood in Bodø for innovation and sustainability.
Earlier in the week, Erdem Lamazhapov of the Fridtjof Nansen Institute had given a lecture on rare earth minerals in the Arctic, and a visit to NordLab, Nord University’s Center for Crisis Management and Collaboration, also took the group out of the seminar room.
– HND Academy combined academic excellence with a truly welcoming and international environment, says Anna Wardak, a participant who joined through the SeaEU network.
The program, she adds, opened the door to meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration.
The students also had a lecture by Janne Eerola about student innovation in Joensuu City (Finland) that has had several successful events.
Running alongside the High North Dialogue conference itself, the HND Academy put the participants in the same rooms as researchers, politicians and other professionals, with the chance to grow their networks and ask them questions directly.
A huge thank you to the STATA project led by Federica Eyja Scarpa and Rasmus Gjedssø Berthelsen. A considerable group of participants were selected and supported through this project.
The Academy returns next year for its 5th edition.
