{ Chronoregimes }
In the narrative of the green transition, the future occupies centre stage. We must act now to enable tomorrow. The future is defined and codified through sustainable development goals, plans, and agendas. Although it is always ahead of us, the future can, through visions, promises, forecasts, and investments, be experienced as more present and stable than the ever-vanishing now.
In Framtidslandet (1988), Sverker Sörlin showed how Sápmi, since the seventeenth century, has been imagined as an internal frontier, constructed as a reserve for resource extraction. [1] As the title suggests, the region has long been regarded as a “land of the future”—a tree that may eventually bear fruit, if only properly cultivated. This rhetoric is reproduced in narratives surrounding “the green transition in the North,” and the anthropologist Elisa Maria López has studied the mining company LKAB’s marketing campaigns filled with slogans such as “Shape the future”. [2] She further shows how the company actively seeks to link Sörlin—and the frontierism described in Framtidslandet—to the green transition, albeit in affirmative terms, framed as a second chance to establish a “sustainable land of tomorrow”.
[3] The Sustainable Development Goals can be perceived as neutral, objectively “good” initiatives for the benefit of the planet, while reproducing economic growth and Western notions of development as normative, and, ultimately, colonial logics in which local perspectives are marginalized. What is described as “sustainable” thus risks becoming socially and politically unjust.[4] From a Swedish perspective, battery factories, “green” steel production, and the extraction of rare earth minerals — crucial to European supply chains — can be understood as steps in an ongoing intra-national colonization process. Leyla Belle Drake has drawn on Anne McClintock’s concept of anachronistic space to understand Sápmi, and the territory’s colonized population as imagined belonging to a different temporal order within modern industrial development, [5] thereby legitimizing inequality and the restriction of rights to presence. “The colonial journey into the virgin interior (…) is figured as proceeding forward in geographical space but backward in historical time,”[6] McClintock writes. It becomes his duty to redeem the retarded place through the gift of modernization: the civilizing of the wilderness.
The production of the future, however, has throughout history been dependent on groups that are excluded from these future visions. Among them are, for instance, the 5,000 itinerant Scandinavian railway labourers who, between 1898 and 1902 alone, laid nearly 300 kilometers of railway through granite, marshlands, and permafrost, connecting the mines in Gällivare to the open sea outside Narvik. Housed in makeshift huts, barracks, and at times earthen dugouts to escape the cold, their exploited bodies laid the foundation for an industrial colonization of northern Sweden, while they were simultaneously forbidden from leaving any trace beyond the railway track. [7] Simultaneously marginalized and central to industrial development, they appear as precursors to today’s migrant workers on the megaprojects of the “green transition.”
While McClintock shows how the Indigenous peoples of Sápmi are constituted as “backward,” both the rallare of the turn of the twentieth century and today’s migrant workers can be understood as assigned to another temporal order subordinate to the future: the temporary. While the Sámi have been cast as a “historical,” or at least passive element in a northern cabinet of curiosities,[8] the workers who make the future possible are relegated to the constantly vanishing present. Translated into regulatory frameworks for time-limited building permits, a form of governance emerges through the definition of the “temporary.” Conditional upon site restoration, the time-limited building permits allow for exceptions to the Swedish Planning and Building Act. They materialize in portable modules placed wherever municipalities can find space, [9] and form “barracks camps” or so-called “entrepreneurial homes”[10] — dwelling units so tiny they are otherwise only deemed “legal” for prisoners. Despite framed as “temporary”, the construction workers who inhabit these accommodations move from one exception to the next. What emerges is a permanent temporariness rendered invisible within narratives of the future.
[1] Sverker Sörlin, Framtidslandet (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1988).
[2] Elisa Maria López, “Back to the Land of the Future: (Re)Producing a Northern Industrial Heartland and Indigenous Homeland for Sweden’s ‘Green Transition’”, in Decolonizing the Sustainable Development Goals, ed. Reetta Toivanen, Vladislava Vladimirova, and Carl-Gösta Ojala (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), 102.
[3] Ibid., 106.
[4] Decolonizing the Sustainable Development Goals, ed. Reetta Toivanen, Vladislava Vladimirova, and Carl-Gösta Ojala (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2026).
[5] Leyla Belle Drake, “Sublime Place, Subaltern Space: Railroad Workers and Female Cooks on the Subarctic Railroad 1898–1902,” Lychnos: An Annual for the History of Ideas and Science (2018): 51–75.
[6] Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather (New York: Routledge, 1995), 30.
[7] Drake, “Sublime Place, Subaltern Space,” 51–75.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Mikael Lindström, interview by the author, Stockholm, 19 March 2026.
[10] Boden Municipality, “First Entrepreneurial Homes Ready to Move In!,” Bodenxt, June 24, 2024, <access article>.
