Traditional Livelihood, Unstable Environment: Adaptation of Traditional Fishing and Reindeer Herding to Environmental Change in the Russian Arctic

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors! The study you have done is very interesting, time-consuming and important from the point of view of assessing the socio-economic situation in the North of Russia.

Unfortunately, the presented results are characterized by a superficial approach, the lack of necessary initial information, and the replacement of a scientific approach with an artistic one.

The study is based on the use of expert methods that cannot be applied without appropriate statistical processing. Only with its use can high reliability of the results obtained be achieved.

In the course of the analysis, the authors often cannot rank the importance of the identified factors and their impact on the socio-economic situation in the region under study.

So most of the situations considered are primarily related to weak organizational work in specific cooperatives, the lack of specialists, the destruction of logistical ties in the sale of crop products. It is possible that industries with low profitability and high social significance require special attention from the state, as, for example, in Soviet times. What does the influence of military ranges and nuclear submarines have to do with it? These are very rare phenomena and they occupy insignificant areas, which can be neglected when assessing the influence of factors on the socio-economic situation.

I hope the authors will be able to analyze the results more correctly, discard slogans and populism and return to the scientific mainstream of their research. I repeat once again - the authors have done a great job and I would like its results to correspond to the efforts expended.

The illustrations in the text are very good.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

First of all, we would like to thank you for the feedback that you’ve provided. We’ve attentively considered all the points you’ve made in the review and have rewritten or expanded the sections of our paper to address some deficiencies of our text that you have pointed out.

Precisely, we have made substantial edits in the Materials and methods section, in order to clarify how our methods of participatory observation and in-depth interviews correspond to the research questions formulated in the Introduction. In the new version of the section, we provide a more thorough explanation of how these methods, while being qualitative and not quantitative, are coherent with our research aims and valid from the point of view of environmental sociology, despite the fact that they don’t produce any data that could be processed statistically. As you know, qualitative research focuses on words rather than numbers and stresses how informants interpret, and understand the social reality, e.g. meanings that individuals allocate to their day to day practices in natural settings [Mohajan, H. K. (2018). Qualitative research methodology in social sciences and related subjects. Journal of Economic Development, Environment and People, 7(1), 23-48; Lichtman, M. (2013). Qualitative research for the social sciences. SAGE publications.] We have employed the methods relevant to ethnography rather than “expert methods” that you refer to - despite some similarities, they are clearly distinct from one another in their origins and application. Statistical verification of narratives of our informants has not been part of our initial research design. At the same time, under different circumstances it would definitely add more weight to our conclusions and we’ll consider the task of quantification of our data for our further research.

Next, we have integrated relevant socioeconomic data that we could access into the Case studies section. In 4.1.4, we did our best to balance the narratives of our informants with relevant literature on the size of herds and public funding of reindeer herding in Murmansk Oblast compared to other regions, as well as on the distribution of different types of land use (specifically, to address the question of importance of military ranges for reindeer herding) and other economic issues of reindeer herding. We hope that providing quantitative data to the socioeconomic context of reindeer herding will correct the superficiality that you’ve pointed out and provide a clear picture of how different socioeconomic factors (deficient financial support, geography, lack of high added value production in the reindeer herding products sector, land use, low attractiveness of reindeer herding for young workers) influence the overall resilience of reindeer herding in the context of climate change.
In 4.2.5, we have added socioeconomic statistics relevant to the place of fisheries in the economy of Murmansk oblast, as well as structural and financial issues in this sector: its orientation towards exporting raw commodities with low added value and severe underdevelopment of fish processing industry. While this data mostly focuses on economic performance of large fishing companies whose impact on Pomor communities is limited, it corroborates the concerns voiced by our informants (notably, regarding the lack of fish processing facilities). Unfortunately, similar official socioeconomic data for recent years is unavailable for Arkhangelsk Oblast, which precludes any quantitative comparisons between the two regions of our study. Nevertheless, the data we used in both cases backs up our point regarding the centrality of high added value production in both reindeer herding and fishing industries.

Overall, while we did our best to address specific criticisms while revising the paper, we think that the perception of our work as deviating too far from the “scientific mainstream” and laden with “populism” and “slogans”, is due to some misunderstanding of our research agenda that stems from the differences that we may have in our research aims and philosophies. By saying this, however, we do not attempt to dismiss your criticisms! While we fully acknowledge that the emphasis on viability of reindeer herding/fishing as of economic activities, use of quantitative methods, ranking the importance of different issues and formulating some policy recommendations are all the expected elements of a good research, we would like to stress that the subjects we’re dealing with and the research methods we employ (socio-ecological resilience of traditional activities of Indigenous communities of the Russian North and the interpretation of our findings through the lenses of actor-network theory and resilience theory) go beyond the assessment of socio-economical situation in reindeer herding and fishing and providing policy recommendations. In our research, we pay attention to social, economic, environmental and material (i.e. use of tools, means of transport, different types of fishing gear, etc. in context of adaptation of daily practices to climate change) aspects of these indigenous activities in equal measure, and represent the interplay of these aspects through heterogeneous actor networks. Such an approach, as we have pointed out in the Theoretical framework chapter, is rather unusual in the context of environmental sociology (hence your remark about the “scientific mainstream”). Indeed, we have to admit that we're trading some of the precision and clarity for a broader view of such a complex phenomena as climate adaptation of Indigenous practices within a specific (“Post-Soviet”) socioeconomic context. Nevertheless, we firmly believe that bringing together resilience studies and ANT the way we did has an important potential for observing and understanding the nature of specific social-environmental (and not just social-economical) issues in the context of global processes such as climate change.
Again, we would like to thank you for the valuable feedback. We hope that we could do it justice while revising our manuscript.

Yours sincerely,

Arsenii Konnov on behalf of all authors

Reviewer 2 Report

It occurs not often that I am greatly and positively surprised by a paper I have been asked to review. This manuscript by Komnov and others is certainly one of them. A great strength of this paper is the fact that the authors go their own way – the manuscript is unusual in the best sense of the word. This applies, for example, to the very appealing illustrations, which are often more artistic elements than visualizations of scientific content. With over 25 pages (without bibliography), the paper is relatively long. When I first read it, my first impulse was to suggest the shortening of certain passages. However, after reading it carefully several times, I moved away from it because I find that the text does not contain any redundancies or superfluous passages. That's why I only have a few, marginal suggestions below.

I would like to thank the editor for the opportunity to review this exceptional manuscript and congratulate the authors on this impressive work. I'm sure this paper will gain the attention of the journal's readers.

Minor, marginal suggestions:

-          Maybe not common in social sciences, however, I`d strongly suggest spelling the scientific name of the reindeer when first mention it in the main text (please spell it in Italics!)

-          Graphical abstract: some of the labels are almost impossible to read, because this graphical abstract is just a fusion of graphical elements presented in the paper – suggest to remove labels / simplify the graphics to be used as part of the graphical abstract

-          I`d suggest a few words about the fact that the reindeer has (at least partly) been influenced by the process of domestication – would appreciate a few thoughts about the implications of this domestication effects in view of adapting to changing environments…

-          Figure1: Kindly note that each map should contain a North arrow and a scale bar…

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,
it is hard to overstate how pleased we were to get such a complimentary review of our work. It is even more rewarding for our team, since for the three of us (Yana, Tatiana and myself) it is the first manuscript to be submitted to an international open-access journal. It is also a result of over three years of fieldwork, discussions and collaborations with informants and artists who provided wonderful illustrations and video content.

We’ve attentively considered all the points you’ve made in the review and made necessary edits in the graphical part (abstract and map), as well as added Latin names of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), herring (Clupea harengus), atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), humpback salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) and saffron cod (Eleginus navaga) as keystone species for reindeer herding and fishing in the White Sea. Regarding the effects of domestication of reindeer, however, we have decided not to include it into the scope of our revision, at least at this stage. The reason for us to keep this suggestion unanswered is that we had to rewrite our manuscript substantially to address the points made by our second reviewer. His/her critique was mostly aimed at lack of quantitative economic data necessary to evaluate the socioeconomic aspect of resilience of fishing and reindeer husbandry. While our research was designed as qualitative, rather than quantitative, from the start and we didn't intend to focus on more conventional analysis of economic issues, these criticisms were quite valid and had to be addressed. Thus, the new version of our manuscript has more emphasis on socioeconomic aspects of reindeer herding and fishing that we have added in the relevant Case study sections, and we thought that delving into the matters of domestication of reindeer and its environmental consequences on top of it would make our manuscript lengthy and stretched over too many subjects without proper justification. However, the issue of domestication is definitely interesting, especially in terms of actor-network theory, and we hope to be able to do it justice in our further research.
Again, I, on behalf of our whole team, would like to express our gratitude for the inspiration that your kind review gave us. We can only hope that our other readers will appreciate our work as well.
Yours sincerely,
Arsenii Konnov on behalf of all authors

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors! You have done a great job of collecting and processing experimental data. And if you position the article as a sociological one, then it is a complete study with a sound methodological base, results and conclusions. But you tried to move into the field of economic studies. And for this, the chosen research apparatus is not sufficient for this. It does not ensure the reliability of the results obtained. So the sociology part of the research is great, the economic part is very naive.