ome exacting economists shy away from using the word “unique” to describe Alaska’s particularities, but local knowledge clearly helps to answer the types of questions that specialized consultants tackle every day. Behind the scenes, they provide answers—or, at least, very educated guesses—to big questions: How are key industries like mining, fishing, and oil and gas development expected to grow, shift, or decline? How can rural communities arrive at consensus on heated topics, and then turn those agreements into action? What would be the economic impact on the state if, say, the Alaska LNG pipeline project moved forward?

Through a combination of field work, data collection, and number crunching, local firms such as Northern Economics, McKinley Research Group, and Agnew::Beck Consulting have been transforming confusion into clarity for decades. “Maybe it’s not that Alaska’s necessarily unique by an economic definition, but we believe that we have a context here that has to be understood to help the kind of clients we really want to help,” says Katie Berry, McKinley’s Director of Economics and Research. “Our work is largely focused on helping Alaskan industries, communities, and people drive themselves forward and make the next set of decisions for their businesses and organizations.”

“Our mission statement is that we help society make better decisions, and we really believe that and want to do that,” Marcus L. Hartley, president of Northern Economics, explains. “We really believe that we want to do things in a non-biased and objective way, that we want to maintain our integrity and strive for excellence, that we want to do meaningful work. That kind of ethical and moral principle is a big part of our firm.”

Hartley bristles at the reputation his field has among some detractors. “It’s like, ‘Oh, just hire a consultant. They’ll give you the answer that you want.’ And that really sticks in our craw,” he says. “No, you’re not going to get the answer that you want. We’re going to give you the answer that we believe is accurate and is reflected by the information that’s available.”

A consultant’s main asset, above all else, is credibility. “We really do value our integrity and our reputation and we want to provide excellence and objectivity. And if we start to fail in that way, then we think that we start to fail as a business,” Hartley says.

Thea Agnew Bemben, co-founder and one of the five principals of Agnew::Beck Consulting, frames the ethical discipline of her company slightly differently. “I think sometimes when people say, ‘Oh, you’re a consultant,’ a lot of times what that means is I’m an expert in certain things and I’m going to come and bring my expertise to you. We approach it as, you’ve identified a need, or something you want to do—whether it’s a plan you want to develop, a problem you want to solve, or a program you want to start—and you’re looking to us to help you with that.”

Agnew explains, “In every community, there are people who work together well, and other ones who maybe don’t always get included, and others who often disagree. Sometimes it’s helpful to have someone from outside of those relationships bring everyone around the table. It’s about creating a structure that helps people articulate what they think is important.

“We also do a lot of work where we help our clients build a financial model for a new program that helps them see the type of staff they would need, how they would credential them, how much they could bill for their services. It helps groups walk through the analytical steps to determine if they can feasibly launch that new program or not.”

In a similar fashion, McKinley Research Group seeks to help clients move projects from the “idea” stage. According to Berry, “We really want to understand what they’re asking, why they’re asking it, how they’ll use it. Sometimes it’s a different type of project that needs us to think about what their questions have to be and especially the methodology that they need us to do to answer that question.”

McKinley Research Group began in 1972 as the McDowell Group. It grew to become Alaska’s largest private research firm, and in 2020 it was acquired by McKinley Capital. All along, the firm has described itself as “multi-disciplinary” because its consultants have working experience in the industries for which the firm conducts research. Berry says, “We have folks who have fished for years in Bristol Bay. Our current president, Susan Bell, grew up in the visitor industry and understands what it means to meet the bus at the dock. Our firm believes that place matters—that where we live, the communities we’re from, all of these connections really matter. And there’s nothing like standing in a place to suddenly understand data that you’ve seen.”

Consultants draw on experience to put data into context. “You can have a lot of haystacks, but if you don’t even know what the needle looks like, then it’s really hard to put something together,” according to Berry. “You can bury people in a tsunami of secondary data and have it mean nothing if we don’t understand the context and, sometimes, just physically what things look like on the ground, too.”

Consulting jobs are often easier when Alaska’s core industries of mining or oil and gas are involved, even for huge projects. “What we often find is there’s a lot of secondary data to work with that’s already been built up, or there’s a set of companies that we can easily access to get some of that confidential data,” Berry explains. “What’s more difficult is when we’re brought to a question of feasibility, market demand, or even economic impact where there’s no data or that the data that exists doesn’t fit really nicely into a box of secondary data.”

Northern Economics’ Hartley concurs. “If you’ve worked in an area for a long time, you know a lot more about how to go about getting the information and making sure it makes sense,” he says. The fisheries industry, which has been a primary topic of research for the majority of Hartley’s career, is one example where it takes an expert to be able to assemble all the disparate pieces of the puzzle into something resembling a whole picture.

“The fishing industry is a little bit of an outlier in that economic employment data are nonexistent because the crew members are independent contractors, so the boats that hire them don’t report their employment data to departments of labor,” Hartley says.

Apart from that, fisheries research has plenty of numbers to crunch. “We have good data on the catch,” Hartley says. “We have good data on the number of boats that are active on a given day or in a given week. We have the fish processors, and all their employment and wage and salary data get reported.”

That just leaves crew employment as a black box. Hartley explains that labor economists can only “generate estimates of it, but they don’t have any data, really, to do so. It’s an issue. It’s certainly something that we’ve talked about and tried to make improvements, but we still don’t have a good way to collect real information on crew members, crew member employment, and crew member incomes.”

In other aspects of the fishing industry, however, change has been swift and dramatic during Hartley’s career. In 2022, looming questions changed to, “‘How are we going to survive if we can’t go fishing?’ I’m talking about the snow crab disaster,” he says. “And even more, recently we’re seeing a lot more questions about what will global warming do to fisheries and fish stocks. How are fish stocks going to shift, and how will fishermen and fish processors and communities react to those shifts? No one really knows. But we’re trying to get some kind of broad-picture perspectives on that and develop some of that information.”

The changing climate also gives Northern Economics new questions to address directly, such as studies of carbon emissions. “We recently did a study on the East Coast for a scallop fishery and quantified how much carbon emissions they could save if they restructured their industry. And they could save a pretty substantial amount,” Hartley says.

Whether the client ends up liking the answers that they’re given or not, Hartley and his colleagues are clear-eyed about the fact that their “job is to provide the information,” he says. “You have to decide, as an economist, whether you’re the decision maker or whether you’re the subject matter expert providing information on the decision. And I think you really have to keep those things separate.”

Katie Berry working with and presenting to the McKinley Research Group team.

McKinley Research Group

While Northern Economics emphasizes expertise in fisheries, maritime transportation, and infrastructure, Agnew::Beck has focused largely on community health and wellness, housing and homelessness, and cultural wellness. Agnew has found that “there’s a lot that Alaska understands and knows how to do. For example, our tribal health system is a wonderful example to other places.”

The Agnew::Beck team has worked on connecting communities to resources. “When I was just starting out, one of the things that I learned and experienced was that funding applications were just not accessible to so many people and communities,” Agnew says. “Since then, many funders have really changed how they put their money out, and in good ways.”

Agnew::Beck engages community members in sometimes surprising ways, like when Meghan Holtan convened a workshop in Fairview atop her stilts.

Agnew::Beck

Agnew::Beck worked with Bristol Bay Native Association and village planning teams to develop resource centers and clinics in six villages.

Agnew::Beck

Agnew::Beck works with rural communities around Alaska and across the Mountain West; this photo is near Togiak in the Bristol Bay region.

sezer66| iStock

In addition, entities such as the Bristol Bay Economic Development Corporation and Tanana Chiefs Conference sponsor grant writing and training, which Agnew::Beck provides to those regions. “These communities often don’t have grant writing in-house, but they do have tons of community knowledge and connections and the ability to do the work that needs to be done,” Agnew says. “We have a similar contract with the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority, where we’ve been one of their technical assistance providers for years.”

In the field of community behavioral health, research can determine whether new services will work. “The Trust will contract with us to help them do the analysis and planning so that, when they apply for funding, it is well targeted,” Agnew says. “For example, we are working with Providence to help develop behavioral health crisis stabilization services in Anchorage.”

Just as success begets success, Agnew is optimistic about the potential to address and alleviate some of the most vexing problems faced by urban and rural parts of the state. “I think we need some vision and hopefulness about this truly incredible place where we live, with so many incredible people and communities. We need to invest in the things that make life better for the people who live here. As a business owner, of course, those investments—like housing, great schools, and a strong university system—make Alaska better for our employees and make people want to stay here. We should be working together to make good things happen and not wasting our energy on negativity and division.”

To sum it up, Agnew says, “What we need is a shared vision and focus on growing healthy communities in Alaska.”