Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a remote tundra village on the Kola Peninsula, I’ll discuss how remoteness and lack of resources affect the centrally promoted socioeconomic reforms and change the current political order.

In particular, I will focus on tourism. The strategy documents for Murmansk region identify tourism as one of the main priorities for innovative development, envisaging a wide range of activities, such as ethnographic tours, extreme sports and salmon fishing. However, the lack of infrastructure limits the realization of these plans. More importantly, the tundra villagers redefine the official idea and the poeticized representations of the glossy ads, and project their own ideas about tourism and local development onto their brief encounters with tourists and tourist companies.  But in the end, who is to shape the future (of tourism) - the local ethos of the community or the regional policy documents?