Ageing, Wellbeing and Climate Change in the Arctic

An interdisciplinary analysis

Paivi Naskali, Marjaana Seppänen, Shahnaj Begum, Paivi Naskali, Marjaana Seppänen, Shahnaj Begum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317485926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gerontology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Arctic and its unique natural resources have become objects of increasing concern. Rapid climate change and ageing of the population are transforming the living conditions in the region. This translates into an urgent need for information that will contribute to a better understanding of these issues.

Ageing, Wellbeing and Climate Change in the Arctic addresses the important intersection of ageing, wellbeing and climate change in the Arctic region, making a key interdisciplinary contribution to an area of research on which little has been written, and limited sources of information are currently available. The book explores three key areas of discussion. First, various political issues that are currently affecting the Arctic, such as the social categorisation of elderly people. Second, the living conditions of the elderly in relation to Arctic climate change. Third, the wellbeing of elderly people in terms of traditional knowledge and lifestyles. The book also features contributions from a number of key researchers in the field which examine a broad range of case studies, including the impact of climate change on health in Lapland and elderly people and geographical mobility in Norway.

This book will be of great interest to scholars of climate change, gerontology and social policy.

Part I
Position of older people and policies in the Arctic

1 How ageism undermines older people’s human rights and social inclusion

Revisiting advocacy, agency and need in later life

Joan Harbison

Introduction

Within the discourse on those in later life, older people are frequently referred to as if they are members of a homogenous group and one that is innately vulnerable (Hall, 2009). This stereotype retains many of the characteristics included in what Binstock refers to as “compassionate ageism” whereby, historically, older people “tended to be seen as poor, frail, dependent, as objects of discrimination, and above all as ‘deserving’” (Hall, 2005, p. 73). What has changed is that older people are no longer considered “deserving”. The public compassion that accompanied the ageism of an earlier era has dissipated. Instead there is anger at the social and economic burden that older people are said to represent (Phillipson, 2013).

Yet scientific research has demonstrated that people in old age are the most diverse of all age groups along many dimensions – for instance, those of health, wealth, education and political views (Binstock, 2005; Chappell, McDonald and Stones, 2008), and that their social and economic burdensomeness is a myth of apocalyptic demography (Gee and Gutman, 2000; McPherson and Wister, 2008, p. 11). Further, old age is predominantly a cultural construct. Thus chronological age, which has so far dominated categorization, if not definition, within the dominant biomedical model of ageing, has limited value for the conceptualization of old age (Baars and Phillipson, 2013; Tulle, 2004). In part this is due to the considerable differences in life expectancy throughout the globe. This means that while fifty years of age is considered old in one cultural or geographic context, it is, chronologically-speaking, part of middle age in others, where life expectancy may be eighty years and upward (Phillipson, 2013).

Notwithstanding these facts, even in those cultural contexts with high life expectancy, a relatively low chronological age may be used as the threshold for old age. For instance, in highly developed countries, people in their fifties and sixties are constructed to serve the interests of commercial markets in the capitalist economy as “senior” consumers for a wide range of goods and services. Banking, insurance and leisure and travel opportunities are marketed to affluent early retirees (Foot and Stoffman, 1996). Bargains in more mundane goods such as basic foods and pharmaceuticals are on offer for those in emerging economies or whose incomes and pensions have been reduced due to the recent world economic recession. Thus many people designated as older are important contributors to economic life. Yet, “once people have categorized someone as young or old they are then likely to apply [negative] stereotypes about age to that person” (Stuckelberger, Abrams and Chastonay, 2012, p. 128). So governments, their institutions and the media continue to cast older people as a burden on health and social services and the overall economy. Such negative stereotypes are prevalent throughout a globalizing world. Further, in some countries, globalization brings with it rejection of the value formerly assigned to old age so that what was once perceived, even revered, as the wisdom of older people is now dismissed. In extreme cases, older people become outcasts in their own societies; named as evil or witches, they become victims of violence or murder (McDonald and Sharma, 2011; see Help Age International website on the situation in Tanzania: www.helpage.org/newsroom). It may be concluded that both chronological age and longevity have only limited relevance in defining “old age”.

As the chapters in this book demonstrate – in a globalizing world more important in constructions of “old age” are changing social, economic and environmental conditions, in concert with the economic and political needs of commerce and the state (Hendricks, 2010). Moreover, the realities of older people’s diversity mean that, except for rare occasions within specific contexts, they themselves do not identify as a homogeneous group in a struggle for their rights (Binstock, 2010; Timonen et al., 2013). In any case, their struggles are less about promoting their own or others rights but in dealing with the societal ageism and [partial] social exclusion that they internalize (Hendricks, 2010; Stuckelberger, Abrams and Chastonay, 2012). While these arguments emanate from Western mainstream culture, they also resonate with the emerging experiences of older people in Arctic communities as they are recounted in this book. Societal ageism also leads older people to either seek or maintain the approval of others through the practices of “successful ageing” including through positively framing or adapting to their circumstances or through lending support to the initiatives taken on their behalf by other more powerful groups of actors (Beard and Williamson, 2011; Dillaway and Byrnes, 2009; Katz and Laliberte-Rudman, 2004).

Ageist constructions of older people

Older people as work able

Governments are now routinely engaged in “grooming” older people, through the rhetoric of apocalyptic demography, to spend a longer time in the work force (Mullan, 2002; McDonald, 2010). They cite the unsustainability of the costs of old age pensions and, ironically, given the demand that older people work longer, of care for their deteriorating health. The coercive factor in such policy development is a delay in eligibility for state pensions (Phillipson, 2012). These policies reflect the recent and growing move away from state responsibility for the collective welfare of its citizens and towards individuals’ responsibility for their own social and economic wellbeing (Leonard, 1997; Walker, 2006). Moreover, such policies fuel intergenerational discord – for instance, when older people compete for jobs with younger generations of unemployed youth in the context of the present economic uncertainties. Delaying pension payments will of-course have the most effect on those who are already poor, in ill-health, and unable to continue to do physically demanding work. Older women too are disproportionately affected given that their participation in the workforce has been limited by the family caring roles associated with their gender, including the nature of the work available to them and its compensation (Foster and Walker, 2013; McMullin, 2010).

Casting older people as a burden on the rest of society

The growth of the global capitalist market economy is a major driving force behind ageist policies. One case example, remarkable in its revelation of how ageism can be constructed through the media, is that of two short reports on the same policy being proposed by the government of the United Kingdom. The articles appeared in a single issue of The Economist – a journal with an increasingly powerful economic voice in the media of a globalizing world. The topic is how much of their financial resources older people would have to contribute to their residential care before they become eligible for government assistance. One article provides what appears as a neutral analysis of the contents of the policy. The writer points out that it would impact relatively few older people given that “the average stay [in a care home] is two years, so not many will spend enough to reach the limit at which the state steps in” (The Economist, [February 16,] 2013, [p.58]). Notwithstanding the apparent facts of the matter, the second article, presumably by a different author (The Economist does not provide author attribution for its content), has the title “Grey Squirrels”. This is a reference to a rapidly increasing and pervasive species, generally considered a pest, that has virtually wiped out England’s traditional red squirrel. The term may be seen as a substitute for the overused “grey” or “silver” “tsunami”. A secondary heading is “Another sop for elderly Britons” and a third announces “The government is looking after the old, and younger people are bearing the brunt of cuts. That’s wrong” (p. 16).

What is remarkable about these comments is not their ageist stance. Statements about the burden that older people represent in terms of public spending and the general economy are common. What is remarkable, given that The Economist is generally regarded as a highly credible publication, is their virulence and the fact that the claims made lack empirical support and indeed are countered in a more factual commentary in the same publication. The point of-course about stereotypes such as ageism is that they do not concern themselves with the “facts” but are based on “our impulse to assign objects, events, and people to meaningful classes, about which we have established beliefs and expectations” (Cuddy and Fiske, 2002, p. 3; see also Stuckelberger, Abrams and Chastonay, 2012).

Much of the ageism that affects people in later life occurs in the less visible private worlds of decreasing access to state supported goods and services, as well as older people’s treatment in a great many contexts, including those of home and institutional health and social care, in interpersonal relations with carers and family members and with regard to their status in their communities (Neysmith and Macadam, 1999). Moreover, the social workers who used to act as advocates for their service needs are now increasingly subsumed under a mantle of governmental managerialism, whose aim is to reduce costs and services by prioritizing service on the basis of risk over need (Ash, 2014; Dunér & Nordström, 2006; Webb, 2006; see also Jumisko in this volume). The cumulative effects of such ageism present challenges to older people’s rights and undermine their agentic potential (Aronson, 2002). This appears as a major consideration among those who argue in support of the agency as well as the rights of older people (Kohn, 2011).

Using human rights to defeat ageism

Human rights may be categorized as including both civil and political rights that protect people’s freedoms and also protect them from discrimination, and social economic and cultural rights that allow people to “realize their full potential as human beings” through the provision of social welfare programs and services (Ife, 2008, p. 31). In the following section, I consider arguments for the links between both categories of rights and ageism, as well as the arguments about how human rights initiatives might address that ageism.

The limitations of using empirical data to support human rights

Peter Townsend (b. 1928 – d. 2009) was a pre-eminent, pioneer researcher on being old in the United Kingdom. His focus was on social scientific research into the specific circumstances of older people’s lives (Johnson, Rolph and Smith, 2007; see for instance Townsend’s The Family Life of Old People, 1957, and The Last Refuge, 1962). In those early days, he perceived a need to look beyond the “immediate cause of the problems…[in] trying to make sense of the poor conditions being experienced by many older people” (Townsend, 2007, p. 30). Townsend reflected on the dominance of “the ‘liberal-pluralist’ tradition, now referred to as the ‘neo-liberal’” (p. 30) – one which gave primacy to capitalist competitive markets in which individuals had the “freedom” to maximize their own wellbeing. He referred to the power of “‘acquiescent functionalism’…a body of thought about ageing that attributed the causes of the problems of old age to the natural consequences of physical decrescence and mental inflexibility, or to the failures of individual adjustment” (p. 30). This in his opinion did not take into account “properly independent scientific evidence” (p. 30). Twenty-five years on, in a chapter entitled “Using human rights to defeat ageism”, Townsend argues that, despite the accumulation of a great deal of scientific data that refutes a simplistic “decline and decay” trajectory for ageing, the effects of acquiescent functionalism are still present in “features of [an] institutionalized ageism” (p. 31; see also Stuckelberger, Abrams and Chastonay, 2012) so that:

Unintentionally, as well as for deliberate reasons of economy and profit or convenience on the part of the state and other institutions [older people’s] dependency is created in market, residential and hospital care and private and public social care policies.

(p. 43)

Townsend argues that this all-encompassing “structured dependency” means that few older people attempt to fight against it (2007). Instead through various psychological mechanisms they become reconciled to their dependency and with it their low valuation in society (Kaufman, 1994 a, b; Grenier and Phillipson, 2013). At the same time, as we have suggested earlier, older people’s dependency is being restructured to incorporate “an artificially structured independence of the welfare state” (Phillipson, 2012).

Older people’s internalization of ageism makes it difficult for them to address. One way to overcome this barrier to action is through the promotion of older people’s human rights. For Townsend, human rights instruments transcend ageism by providing a moral authority that is accepted in democratic states, regarding both civil and political rights and social, economic and cultural rights. Hence these instruments can “offer a framework of thought and planning early in the 21st century that enables society to take a fresh, and more hopeful direction” (2007, p. 43). He does not focus on a new international Convention on the Rights of Older Persons. For him what is most needed is a means of overcoming discrimination against older people, and this lies in its empirical exposure through the use of existing human rights mechanisms as “a framework [for] rigorous analysis and anti-discriminatory work” (p. 43; see also Stuckelberger, Abrams and Chastonay, 2012). The question remains, however, of the extent to which anti-discriminatory work in the context of profoundly ageist societies can succeed, especially in the absence of the collective agency of older people (Katz and Laliberte-Rudman, 2004; Kohn, 2011).

Is a new international human rights convention the solution to older ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ageing in the Arctic
• Part I Position of older people and policies in the Arctic
• Part II Elderly people and climate change
• Part III Wellbeing of elderly people
• Part IV Local traditions of Arctic communities
• Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index