Towards a normative conceptual framework for assessing Arctic infrastructure: the Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk Highway

Abstract Existing frameworks for assessing Arctic transportation systems currently give limited attention to qualitative dimensions, focusing primarily on biophysical and engineering aspects. While essential, these approaches capture only part of how infrastructure functions within coupled socio-ecological systems. The paper therefore asks how Arctic infrastructure in thawing permafrost regions and cultural landscapes can be assessed qualitatively through a co-creative research design that relates empirical-analytical entry points to a normative frame. It develops a normative conceptual framework for assessing Arctic infrastructure, using the Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk Highway (ITH) as an exploratory case. The analysis is grounded in preliminary ethnographic and literature-based research of the ITH. Opened in 2017, the 138-kilometre gravel road connects Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk in Canada’s Western Arctic, crossing both Inuvialuit and Crown land. As a major transport infrastructure built in a rapidly changing permafrost environment, the highway provides a productive case for examining how material, ecological, political, and socio-cultural processes become intertwined through infrastructure. The framework brings five entry points – promises, workers, temporality, materiality and non-humans, and users – into relation with the concept of alimentary infrastructure. It can be used to study interactions among infrastructure, materiality, labour, land use and more-than-human relations, and extends biophysical assessment tools with dimensions that are often insufficiently represented in conventional infrastructure assessment.