Researcher
Elana Wilson Rowe
Contactinfo and files
Summary
Dr Elana Wilson Rowe is research professor (part time) at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. Wilson Rowe’s research and expertise areas include governance of nature and changing power relations in the Anthropocene, Arctic and ocean governance and geopolitics, and Russian climate and Arctic policymaking. Her publications explore how the interplay of diplomatic practices, security rivalries and expert/environmental knowledge shape outcomes and understandings in regional and global policy fields.
She is the author of Russian Climate Politics: When Science Meets Policy (Palgrave, 2013) and Arctic Governance: Power in cross-border relations (University of Manchester, 2018). She was a member of Norway’s committee establishing research priorities for the UN Ocean Decade. She holds a BA in Russian and Geography from Middlebury College (USA) and an MPhil and PhD in Geography/Polar Studies from the University of Cambridge (2006). More publications and links can be found on Google Scholar.
Wilson Rowe was the PI and led a 5- year major grant from the European Research Council (#80335, 2019-2024. Read more about the Lorax project here). The aim of this project was to understand the broader regional and global repercussions of governance efforts anchored in sub-global ‘ecosystems’ or ‘ecoregions’ and how the power relations enacted around ecosystems shape regional and global ordering. Wilson Rowe has also led projects funded by the Norwegian Research Council, Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Norwegian Ministry of Defence.
Expertise
Education
2002-2006 D. Phil., human geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
2001-2002 M. Phil., human geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
1997-2001 B.A., Geography/Russian, Middlebury College, Vermont, USA
Work Experience
2023- Professor of International Relations, Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU)
2006- Senior Research Fellow/Research Professor, NUPI
2006-2022 Senior research fellow, NUPI 2010- Adjunct Professor at Nord University
2002-2006 Teaching Assistant/Supervisor, Geography Department, University of Cambridge
Aktivitet
Filter
Clear all filters
Security realities of freezing politics and thawing landscapes in the Arctic
Russia’s re-invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has had immediate and ongoing effects for Arctic security and cooperative governance at both a regional an...
Options for Arctic governance in difficult weather
The Arctic continues to be transformed and impacted by global forces, from declining sea ice on the Arctic Ocean, through new summers of devastati...
Arctic Pressures (ArcPres)
Russia’s reinvasion of Ukraine in 2022 precipitated a challenging new chapter for Arctic political and security dynamics. Going forward, security and governance developments in the reg...
Considering ecological security from the perspective of Arctic ecosystemic politics
This brief essay is part of a book forum on Matt McDonald's book (2021) presenting the idea of ecological security. In the essay, I reflect on progress and prospects for Arctic cooperation and governance in order to consider the promise and limitations of McDonald’s ecological security framework. The Arctic is an instructive example for such an exploration. The longstanding post-Cold War cooperation in the Arctic is strongly rooted in an appreciation of the interconnected nature of the Arctic ecosystem, even as the governance mechanisms remain far from what would qualify as an ecological security approach in McDonald’s sense. Nonetheless, I suggest that especially two aspects are instructive from the Arctic example. The first relates to how ecological security would potentially interface with an already quite full landscape of governance practices rooted in ecosystems, and associated power political genealogies and effects. The second point is a reflection on unfolding events, seeking to explore how continued inputs from other forms of security governance could impact on emerging or partial attempts to govern with an ecological security perspective. Here, the status of Arctic cooperative governance after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an illustrative example to consider. Both points can be read as impediments limiting the applicability of the ecological security framework. However, as McDonald argued, impediments are not the same as absolute limits (2021, 192) and potential obstacles are explored here in the spirit of advancing possibilities for ecological security.
Ecosystems and Ordering: Exploring the Extent and Diversity of Ecosystem Governance
This article argues that, to grasp how global ordering will be impacted by planetary-level changes, we need to systematically attend to the question of the extent to which and how ecosystems are being governed. Our inquiry builds upon—but extends beyond—the environmental governance measures that have garnered the most scholarly attention so far. The dataset departs from the current literature on regional environmental governance by taking ecosystems themselves as the unit of analysis and then exploring whether and how they are governed, rather than taking a starting point in environmental institutions and treaties. The ecosystems researched—large-scale marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems—have been previously identified by a globe-spanning, natural science inquiry. Our findings highlight the uneven extent of ecosystem governance—both the general geographic extent and certain “types” of ecosystems seemingly lending themselves more easily to ecosystem-based cooperation. Furthermore, our data highlight that there is a wider range of governance practices anchored in ecosystems than the typical focus on environmental institutions reveals. Of particular significance is the tendency by political actors to establish multi-issue governance anchored in the ecosystems themselves and covering several different policy fields. We argue that, in light of scholarship on ecosystem-anchored cooperation and given the substantive set of cases of such cooperation identified in the dataset, these forms of ecosystem-anchored cooperation may have particularly significant ordering effects. They merit attention in the international relations scholarship that seeks to account for the diversity of global ordering practices.
Navigating Breakup: Security realities of freezing politics and thawing landscapes in the Arctic
Russia’s re-invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has had immediate and ongoing effects for Arctic security and cooperative governance at both a regional and international level. The region is impacted by the increased sanctions, the withdrawal of Western companies from Russia, the Western disconnect from energy dependencies, and has also witnessed an increase in hybrid security incidents. In addition, climate change continues at to change the environment at a staggering pace in the north. This report is an input to the Arctic Security Roundtable (ASR) and the Munich Security Conference, February 2023. It provides insights into both established and novel drivers of change in Arctic and security governance. Chapters cover the impacts of climate change on the physical environment, human security and the Arctic region’s military operational environment, and review the regional security policies of the three major powers (USA, China and Russia). The report argues leaders must continue to address Arctic governance challenges and take concrete steps to mitigate and manage risks, regardless of the cessation of cooperation with Russia and the radical uncertainty shaping the broader political environment.
Space, nature and hierarchy: the ecosystemic politics of the Caspian Sea
The Anthropocene has given rise to growing efforts to govern the world’s ecosystems. There is a hitch, however, ecosystems do not respect sovereign borders; hundreds traverse more three states and thus require complex international cooperation. This article critically examines the political and social consequences of the growing but understudied trend towards transboundary ecosystem cooperation. Matchmaking the new hierarchy scholarship in International Relations (IR) and political geography, the article theorises how ecosystem discourse embodies a latent spatially exclusive logic that can bind together and bound from outside unusual bedfellows in otherwise politically awkward spaces. The authors contend that such ‘ecosystemic politics’ can generate spatialised ‘broad hierarchies’ that cut across both Westphalian renderings of space and the latent post-colonial and/or material inequalities that have hitherto been the focus of most of the new hierarchies scholarship. Rowe and Beaumont illustrate their argument by conducting a multilevel longitudinal analysis of how Caspian Sea environmental cooperation has produced a broad hierarchy demarking and sharpening the boundaries of the region, become symbolic of Caspian in-group competence and neighbourliness, and used as a rationale for future Caspian-shaped cooperation. They reason that if ecosystemic politics can generate new renderings of space amid an otherwise heavily contested space as the Caspian, further research is warranted to explore systemic hierarchical consequences elsewhere.
A Governance and Risk Inventory for a Changing Arctic
Background Paper for the Arctic Security Roundtable at the Munich Security Conference 2020