Analytical report. This analytical report is one of three deliveries produced as part of the foresight and visioning exercise for the Northern Sparsely Populated Areas (NSPA). The two other outputs are a Vision report entitled "Strong, Specific and Promising: Towards a Vision for the NSPA in 2020" (Nordregio WP 2009:4) and a policy road map for their future development and positioning in the European and global perspectives. This report has mainly functioned as an input to the discussions in the Foresight workshops that were organised in Stockholm September, 11th and 12th and October 16th and 17th, 2008. The objective was to allow each participant to relate her or his own region to the NSPA as a whole, answering questions such as: what is different? What is similar? How does the NSPA make sense as a spatial context to understand ongoing processes and to design development strategies? This is however a revised version of the report initially distributed to the workshop participants, taking into account comments made on the maps and correcting and complementing some initially results.