Reflecting on forty years contextual evolution of arctic port research: The past and now

Despite its political, regulatory, technical, and environmental challenges, the recent trend of ice melting in the Arctic region has caused the increase in international shipping activities. Accordingly, this is supported by research focusing on a wide variety of shipping issues in the Arctic. Surprisingly, this is not the case in Arctic port research. That being said, considering the role of ports in the development of maritime transportation and recent activities in the Arctic, it was critical to map academic and managerial implications of the research in such a terrain. In doing so, this study focused on research articles which addressed the subject since 1980. Through a systematic analysis, the spatial scale (i.e., foreland and maritime space (global), hinterland (regional/national), and port (local) scales), and functional perspective (i.e., space- related (locational), activity-related (operational) and consequence-related (impact) perspectives) of 38 representative articles were extracted and used. The findings suggest that, despite the historic similarity between Arctic shipping and Arctic port research, there was a widening gap between such trends in the last ten years, and at the same time, the contribution of Arctic port articles was very limited. Over the past years, the order of impact of Arctic port research was that the consequence-related global scale issues were highest followed by regional/national and local scales respectively. This was in contrast to port research, in which activity- related local scale research ranked the highest. Also, a comparison of research between Northern Sea Route (NSR) and the North West Passage (NWP) was carried out to understand the attitude of infrastructure holders along those routes. Investigation revealed that more than 70% of research was conducted on the NSR. Unlike the NWP, the research direction for the NSR followed a particular trend over the past four decades with the 2010-June 2019, dominated by consequence-related global scale research.