Date of Award

12-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Statement

Doctor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies

Department

Arctic and Northern Studies

Granting Institution

University of Alaska Fairbanks

Committee Chair

Lovecraft, Amy

Committee Member

Boylan, Brandon

Committee Member

Fondahl, Gail

Committee Member

Kettle, Nathan

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: General introduction.

1.1 Situating scholarship within and beyond the Anthropocene

2.1 Environmental governance

1.3 Theoretical framework

1.4 The liminal-littoral: engaging with coasts

1.5 Methods and methodology

1.6 Author-ship: a positionality statement

1.7 Works cited.

Chapter 2: On the limits of the complex systems paradigm: reckoning with entropy, adaptation, and agency in the Anthropocene.

2.1 Abstract

2.2 Approaching the complex systems paradigm

2.2.1 Systems all the way down? The Anthropocene challenge to universalism

2.2.2 The limits of the "social" in social-environmental systems

2.2.3 Earth system models, prediction, and the human desire for certainty

2.2.4 The social origins and function of complex adaptive systems

2.2.5 The Anthropocene as an engine of uncertainty

2.3 Comparing systems and assemblages for governance

2.3.1 Agency and intentional subjects

2.3.2 ORder, causality, and dynamism

2.3.3 Sympoeisis and emergence

2.3.4 Power/knowledge

2.4 Conclusion

2.5 Works cited.

Chapter 3: Alaska's network society: approaching the role of infrastructure in environmental governance.

3.1 A brief history of Alaska's communications networks

3.2 Telecommunications within the Alaska Coastal Management Program

3.3 Why assemblage-thinking matters for governance

3.4 Works cited.

Chapter 4: Commoning and uncommoning the coast: an institutional history of coastal management in Alaska.

4.1 Abstract

4.2 Introduction

4.2.1 Defining a coastal commons

4.2.2 Commoning as shared strategies

4.2.3 Why is Arctic Integrated Costal Zone Management (ICZM) research important?

4.3 Methods

4.3.1 Data-gathering

4.3.2 Institutional analysis of Alaska coastal management

4.4 Institutional history and analysis of the ACMP

4.4.1 Commoning the coast: 1977-1999 (period 1)

4.4.2 Coastal commons: 1999-2003 (period 2)

4.4.3 Uncommoning the coast: 2003-2011 (period 3)

4.4.4 Coastal program resuscitation (2011-2012)

4.5 National Environmental Protection Act

4.6 Discussion and conclusion

4.7 Works cited.

Chapter 5: Maritimus and arctos: a lineage of hybrid territorialization.

Works cited.

Chapter 6: Self-governance, subsistence, and spatial justice: assembling a more-than-human lawscape in Alaska's Arctic Coastal Zone.

6.1 Abstract 

6.2 Introduction

6.2.1 The deep structure of the arctic lawscape

6.2.2 A coastal response assemblage

6.2.3 Social-Environmental Network Analysis (SENA)

6.2.4 An assemblage approach to governance responses-in-context

6.3 Alaska's coastal lawscape

6.3.1 How was the coast assembled before the ACMP?

6.3.2 The power of Alaska's arctic municipalities under the ACMP

6.3.3 Producing Indigenous and state space through the ACMP

6.3.4 Coastal district plans and enforceable policies

6.4 Arctic coastal management after the ACMP

6.5 Discussion

6.6 Concluding thoughts

6.7 Works cited.

Chapter 7: Conclusion.

7.1 Historical contribution

7.1.1 The ACMP as an early innovator of ICZM

7.1.2 The consequences of an institutional vacuum

7.1.3 The erosion and loss of the ACMP resulted in a transition from a positional to distributional politics for municipalities

7.1.4 An arctic behemoth and climate X

7.2 Policy recommendations

7.3 Theoretical contribution

7.4 On the limitations of this research

7.4.1 Beringia's other shores

7.4.2 A self-limiting methodology

7.4.3 Did assemblages kill the SES star?

7.4.4 Indigenous politics, the Anthropocene, and narrative of crisis

7.5 Adrift over arctic coasts

7.6 Works cited.

Abstract

Anthropocene discourses raise questions about the political agency of nonhuman nature and the error of human exceptionalism, blurring distinctions between the subjects and objects of environmental governance. In the Arctic, the environment’s capacity to determine how and what kind of activities can take place has long existed in tension with the legal and political systems imposed by colonial powers. How can governance and decision-making for destabilized socionatural communities be reconceived from a more-than-human perspective? Through the lenses of assemblage thinking, posthumanism, and Indigenous law, this dissertation interrogates conventional approaches to understanding and governing the Arctic and, focusing on the history of the Alaska Coastal Management Program, advances more relational interpretations of how complex change takes place on Arctic coasts. Arguing for the utility of assemblage thinking under Anthropocene conditions of rapid nonlinear change, it explores the multiscalar spatial and temporal dimensions of Arctic coastal governance as sites where the material and the social are inextricably co-constituted. The processes by which diverse human communities share information and perform legal obligations intersect with how bio- and geophysical agents produce space and normativity to form a spectrum of commons and enclosures. The Alaska Coastal Management Program is shown to have begun realizing aspects of common responsibility, epistemic plurality, and polycentrism prior to its political erosion and untimely termination. Its equitable and inclusive structure, procedures, and spatialities are highlighted as components of a responsive model for contending with rapid and unpredictable change, for which coastal Alaska today is politically and legally unprepared. As threats to social-environmental well-being increase, rehabilitating governance models that respectfully recognize local and Indigenous interests and knowledges and account for nonhuman interests and norms becomes essential. Life on Arctic coasts demonstrates fundamental interdependence and fluidity between the human and nonhuman, which must be reflected in the rules, processes, and structures of governance if socionatural communities are to persist through the Anthropocene.

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