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Abstract Cities located in the Arctic often have extreme geographic and environmental contexts and unique sociopolitical and economic trajectories that, when combined with amplified effects of climate change in the region, impact future sustainable development. Well-recognized and standardized sustainable development indicator (SDI) frameworks such as ISO 37120 or UN-Habitat City Prosperity Index are often used to compare data across cities globally using comprehensive sets of indicators. While such indexes help characterize progress toward development and guide short- and long-term decision-making, they often lack relevance to specific contexts or characterize future visions of urban growth. To evaluate the extent of these deficiencies and to provide a comparative analysis of approaches to sustainable urban growth in the Arctic, this paper analyzes city planning documents for five northern cities - Anchorage (USA), Utqiagvik (USA), Reyjavik (ISL), Iqaluit, (CAN), Whitehorse, (CAN) - for goals, targets, and indicators and compare these to thematic areas and indicators defined by ISO 37120:2018 Sustainable Cities and Communities. The results confirm that although international SDI frameworks may be useful for comparative analysis of cities across diverse regions, they exclude important local factors that influence goal-oriented urban sustainability planning strategies employed in the Arctic region. 

Understanding and redressing the climate crisis in the Arctic demands acknowledging and translating perspectives from frontline communities, environmental scientists, Indigenous knowledge bearers, and social scientists. As a first approximation to the question of how Arctic scientists conceptualize and enact “knowledge co-production,” we analyze how they write about it in their academic publications through a systematic literature review. Based on the results, we identify the lack of clear definition and practical engagement with “co-production” understood as a practice of integrating knowledges and methodological approaches from various disciplines and cultures. We raise concerns regarding researchers’ claims of co-production without understanding what it means, which is particularly harmful for Arctic communities whose knowledge practices scientists have long marginalized and exploited. In response, we argue that feminist STS scholarship provides crucial guidance on how to create and sustain meaningful relationships for knowledge co-production. These relationships can potentially subvert power inequities that have prevented many Arctic science teams from breaking out of traditional disciplinary silos to create new forms of knowledge exchange, particularly those based on notions of care for collaborators, communities, and equity.