The project will also generate scientific knowledge for complex assessment of the positive and negative impacts of development and tourism on other remote regions of the world.

Geographically, the project focuses on informal roads and local communities in the north of Irkutsk region and Republic of Buryatia in Siberia with economic, demographic, and environmental conditions and trends representative of the broader Arctic/Subarctic region.

The main project goal is to understand the effect of roads on formal and informal economies, social relations, cultural traditions and relations between humans and the environment.

This goal will be addressed implementing the following broad interrelated objectives:

• Map, document, and analyze the evolution of spatial extent, maintenance history, and condition of formal and informal roads within the study area for several time-periods using a range of remote sensing products, archival work, and local knowledge.
• Assess the importance and use (e.g. “relative transportation accessibility”) of different types of roads for diverse population groups representing different gender, occupation, ethnicity, age, and economic means using field observations and in-depth interviews;
• Provide an integrative assessment of the informal roads’ impacts on socio-economic (e.g. subsistence, extractive and tourism economies, social relations, culture), and environmental (e.g. ecological habitats, vegetation, wildlife, hydrology, permafrost) conditions of local communities
• Work closely with local communities to develop plan for sustainable development and use of transportation infrastructure.

Palimpsest is one of the metaphors that allows an artistic perspective. It is instrumental for understanding changes in the built environment: houses have been built and rebuilt, roads were formed and degraded. However, the term has not yet been used for studies of human and non-human interactions from the local and Indigenous perspectives. In our project, we aim to combine systems approach and palimpsest metaphor with the local and Indigenous knowledge. We find it possible to engage with all these forms of knowledge on all stages of the project, including gathering, analyzing, curating, interpreting and presenting data and ideas situated in a specific context of our study area.

Our project is developed in partnership with the local and Indigenous community of Evenki. Their traditional land use includes hunting for ungulates, fishing, gathering Siberian pine nuts, berries and herbs that provide them with food and hunting on sables and gathering Siberian pine nuts for cash income.  According to indigenous epistemology, landscape is considered as a sentient being. It has its own agency and can “fight back” the view not dissimilar to the actor-network theory. However, while Bruno Latour considers non-human actants only as mediators for extending human agency, in Evenki worldviews the agency can be assigned to animals, fire, weather, rivers and even to specific forest groves. Moreover, for Evenki, the boundaries between human and non-human beings are not defined clearly. For example, according to the local legends, one of the Evenki tribes was formed as a result of Evenki-reindeer herders with half-human beings covered with fur and subsisted on fish. Attribution of human characteristics to animals, trees, and inanimate objects through spirits eventually questions the ethics of killing or harvesting. During the ethnological expedition tasked with identifying sacred places to protect during pipeline construction, ethnographers met a lack of understanding among Evenki, who often were noting that everything is sacred and needs protection (Sirina 2012).