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A green transition powered by large-scale, renewable energy is under way in northern Sweden, featuring innovations in fossil-free mining, green steel production, and lithium-ion battery manufacturing. These new initiatives are the most ambitious in decades, envisioned by companies and politicians as a bright, green future for a region haunted by a history of population and economic decline. However, to meet the demands of growing green industries, the north will have to attract an additional 100,000 residents and increase its renewable energy production thirteen-fold. Building on interview data with key stakeholders in Norrbotten and V¨asterbotten, Sweden’s two northernmost counties, this article investigates the drivers behind this green growth and examines the challenges that municipalities and industries will face in achieving it. In the long term, can the demands of a growing green economy be met while delivering justice to the rural and Indigenous S´ami populations of the region who have alternative visions for land use in the north? To answer this question, this article lays out a framework that complements existing approaches to justice in green transitions, identifying potential incongruences between growth and justice. This framework emphasizes the need to take into account four factors – order, timescale, agendas, and actors – which ultimately shape the priorities, possibilities, and justice of green transformation outcomes. 

The collaborative study on gender equality and empowerment in the Arctic (UGEEA) aims to improve understanding of gender equality issues in the New Arctic at the national, regional, and local levels, identify concrete strategies for gender political, economic, and civic empowerment, and thereby facilitate sustainable policymaking for the New Arctic. This study employs an inclusive, collaborative approach to collect and analyze datasets, documents, and case studies to understand to what extent political, economic, and civic empowerment is distributed by gender. Broader impacts of the UGEEA Project include recommendations for the promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women, raising public awareness of gender issues in the Arctic, and the development of a publicly available data compendium on gender empowerment. The study also aims to narrow the existing knowledge gaps on gender empowerment across Circumpolar regions by including an assessment of gender empowerment at different levels relevant to the Arctic countries — national/quasi-national (for Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland), subnational (regional), municipal, and local (community) levels. The dataset examines gender earnings gap, gender disparity in tertiary education, and women's political leadership in the Arctic at the regional/(sub)national levels.