Jan 2026: Chapter by Timothy Heleniak in The Palgrave Handbook of Arctic Policy and Politics
The second edition of The Palgrave Handbook of Arctic Policy and Politics, edited by Carin Holroyd and Ken Coates, has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan. The book brings together a diverse group of international scholars and practitioners from North America and Northern Europe, spanning multiple academic disciplines, to contextualize the Arctic across fields of study while focusing on the central theme of policy innovation and political action.
The handbook includes a chapter by InfraNorth researcher Timothy Heleniak, titled “Population Change in the Arctic.” In this chapter, Heleniak analyzes population change in the Arctic since 1990, showing the considerable diversity in population growth rates among Arctic regions and settlements over the past three decades, ranging from a near doubling of the population of Nunavut in Canada to a 70 percent decline in the population of Chukotka in the Russian Far East.
In this chapter, Heleniak notes that at lower geographic levels, there has been a trend towards the concentration of populations into larger urban centers and considerable shrinkage or closure of many smaller settlements. A combination of demographic and economic factors has contributed to these trends, including Russia’s transition to a market economy. Within this context, there are also significant demographic differences between Arctic Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations. As the author observes, all Arctic regions are part of demographically advanced countries, but they differ considerably in population size, growth rates, and settlement structure as well as in fertility, epidemiological, and migration patterns.
For more information, please visit the Palgrave Macmillan website.
