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As cities around the world increasingly seek to brand themselves as comfortable and liveable places, policies aimed at enhancing the quality of the urban environment are becoming more important. Scholars interpret this development as evidence of reinforced urban entrepreneurialism and neoliberalization. The current paper focuses on comfortable city policies in Russia, where political, social and economic transformations were often depicted as the ‘Eastern branch’ of the global neoliberalization project. It draws on field data from a case study of two cities in the Russian Arctic. By focusing on locations far away from global nodes, where the ideas of a comfortable city originally took shape, we trace and analyse policy mutations and local adjustments of such policies, as well as the related rationalities and policymaking dynamics. Our findings speak to the literature on policy mobility by questioning the focus on cities as entrepreneurial actors and the depiction of comfortable city policies as mere vehicles of neoliberalism. In Russia, what began with the introduction of entrepreneurial, globally circulating comfortable city policies incrementally turned into a top-down political project that cannot be easily explained – neither by neoliberal rationality nor by the legacies of urban planning and development.

This paper examines why and how the development of the forestry and fishery sectors in Northwest Russia have taken very different trajectories during the transition period and examines the impacts of these trajectories on the rural areas concerned. The drive to establish natural resources as “resources” in an economic sense during the transition period acts as the starting point for the analysis. However, the success of this drive has depended on the adaptation of formerly Soviet institutions to the new circumstances. These include the privatisation of Soviet production units (lespromkhozes and fishery kolkhozes) and the introduction of new systems for the distribution of fish and forest resources (auctions and quotas). From the analysis of data collected from four types of actors in Murmansk Oblast (a collective fishing farm, State owned logging companies in forestry villages, fishery management units and local forest management structures), the paper seeks to present these actors’ adaptations, changes, opportunities and ultimately destiny during the 1990s.

This essay aims to contribute to the understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on a Norwegian- Russian social work research project. The reflexive act of writing about the project’s disrupted startup is an exercise of flexibility and dynamics in the research process. Well known grips for those of us working with qualitative inquiry. Still, the unpredictable landscape, uncertainty of what would come next, and the insecurity in the present moved us as researchers towards new local and contextual knowledge, forced by the pandemic’s extensive effects.