Governing Complexity in the Arctic Region

Mathieu Landriault,Andrew Chater,Elana Wilson Rowe,P. Whitney Lackenbauer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000733891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines emerging forms of governance in the Arctic region, exploring how different types of state and non-state actors promote and support rules and standards.

The authors argue that confining our understandings of Arctic governance to Arctic states and a focus on the Arctic Council as the primary site of circumpolar governance provides an incomplete picture. Instead, they embrace the complexity of governance in the Arctic by systematically analyzing and comparing the position, interventions, and influence of different actor groups seeking to shape Arctic political and economic outcomes in multiple sites of Arctic politics, both formal and informal. This book assesses the potential that sub-national governments, corporations, civil society organizations, Indigenous peoples, and non-Arctic states possess to develop norms and standards to ensure a stable, rule-based Arctic region. It will be of interest to all scholars and students working in the fields of Arctic Sovereignty, Security Studies, Global Governance, and International Political Economy.

1
Arctic states and regional governance

Arctic states have been pivotal actors in regional governance, representing the main architects of the existing institutional infrastructure. Multilateralism and pragmatic co-operation between these states have dominated regional dynamics. At the same time, Arctic states have been adamant about promoting their predominant role and stature, especially in relation to non-Arctic states. We will see that this posture has evolved in recent years, leading to institutional reforms adding new pieces to Arctic governance.

As the amount of ice in the Arctic has diminished, the diversity of governance institutions for the Arctic region has increased concurrently. In 1996, the Arctic Council (AC) was essentially a governmental environmental research forum that issued occasional policy recommendations. Today, it also serves as a broader policy-making body for the Arctic region. In 1996, environmental issues such as persistent organic pollutants and contaminants dominated policy conversations. Today, climate change has multiplied the environmental issues with which the AC grapples, as well as the economic opportunities in the region. In 1996, the AC stood as the main venue for conversation on the transnational governance of the Arctic, akin to an Arctic United Nations dominated by its eight members: the Arctic states (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States). Today, new sites for conversation, such as the Arctic Circle Assembly (ACA) and the Arctic Economic Council (AEC), have emerged, providing new platforms and forums for a broad array of academic, industry, regional, and non-Arctic actors to contribute to solving key regional issues.

How have the regional governance initiatives put forward by the Arctic sovereign states changed over time? Focusing on the AC, the ACA, and the AEC, this chapter reveals how the AC evolved over the last two decades, and why the ACA and AEC emerged to complement it.

Arctic ultilateralism – the Arctic Council

The Arctic Council represents the primary body for regional governance in the circumpolar north. Four key observations characterize the role and evolution of the AC in the broader Arctic governance framework as it has evolved over the last quarter century. First, the AC began as a limited environmental governance body created and dominated by the Arctic states. Second, there were early disagreements about its role in policy-making and the elasticity of its mandate. Third, the AC’s policy-making role and mandate have grown, assuming not only generative and catalyst functions but also a regulatory role in harmonizing national policies. While the role changed, however, the international character of the body did not. Fourth, new forums have emerged that provide space for a broad array of actors to contribute to Arctic governance discussions and, some commentators believe, challenge the pre-eminence of the AC.

Early assessments of the AC observed a weak and uncertain body. Evan Bloom, an American diplomat involved in the council’s creation, described the AC in 1999 as:

A forum without legal personality, and thus not as an ‘international organization’ as that term is understood under international law, was an objective of the United States and is consistent with a tendency in recent American diplomatic practice to seek an informal co-operative structure when that structure is adequate for the purposes of the issues involved.

(721)

The year before, political scientist Huebert (1998) questioned “whether or not this effort can be sustained, and whether Canada will maintain its leadership role” (57). Legal scholars Koivurova and Vanderzwaag (2006) were pessimistic, highlighting that in the AC’s work “a ‘study and talk’ mentality has prevailed with numerous projects and workshops promoted and carried out” (191). Young (2005) offered more optimism, emphasizing that “the momentum associated with the growth of regional co-operation in the Arctic is sufficiently strong and the emergence of an Arctic-specific agenda is sufficiently clear to provide some basis for optimism regarding the success of region building in the region” (14).

Various scholarly works have called for an expanded AC with a mandate broadened beyond its historic service as an environmental research forum. Byers (2012) puts forward 11 recommendations, including the creation of an oil spill prevention treaty, a black carbon treaty, and a “negotiation of a treaty to demilitarize the surface of the Central Arctic Ocean” (23). The Munk-Gordon Arctic Security Program, a policy institute associated with the University of Toronto, echoes Byers’s call and advocates that the AC mandate grow to include military security. While we do not share this view that expanding the AC’s mandate will make it stronger, we argue that it is necessary to look beyond the Council to understand the full breadth of Arctic governance bodies and embrace new non-statist institutions.

The AC began as a limited environmental governance body created and dominated by the Arctic states, emerging out of a genuine desire among the Arctic states to address regional environmental issues and to ease Cold War tensions. The superpower struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States defined international conflict throughout the second half of the 20th century. In response, some actors embraced Arctic collaboration as a mechanism to help defuse the situation. As such, the AC emerged from a late-twentieth-century international context of a growing global environmental consciousness, thawing Cold War relations, and a belief that the Arctic offered a venue to defuse tensions.

In 1983, the United States government unveiled an Arctic policy that opened the door to collaboration with the Soviet Union in the region, citing enthusiasm for “mutually beneficial international co-operation in the Arctic” (“United States Arctic Policy”). Two years later, political scientist Oran Young called on Arctic governments to declare the region as a “zone of peace” (174). In October 1987, following an agreement on the reduction of nuclear stockpiles, Russian Premier Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech in Murmansk, Russia that proposed designating the Arctic region a “zone of peace” to follow co-operation on environmental protection (Gordon Foundation, 2010: 1).

The Murmansk speech represented a clear breakthrough. Gorbachev affirmed genuine interest in environmental protection: the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, a meltdown that resulted in hundreds of deaths and the abandonment of a town of nearly 50,000, raised the fear that Russia’s lax environmental standards would result in another transboundary catastrophe (English, 2013: 10). Still, officials in various governments doubted the seriousness of Gorbachev’s “zone of peace” proposal. If truly earnest, the Russian Premier might have proposed the closure of Murmansk’s large military base. Nevertheless, the government of Finland, a former colony of Russia, sought to use the opportunity to improve relations between its allies and former colonizer. Officials pushed for a nuclear submarine agreement (in 1983), held a peace summit (in 1987), and finally hosted a conference on Gorbachev’s idea in Rovaniemi, Finland in September 1989. This meeting led to the creation of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) in June 1991 (Young, 1998; Keskitalo, 2004; English, 2013), through which state scientists met bi-annually to discuss co-operation on environmental issues. The following five years saw the co-creation and exchange of new knowledge on items such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and the life expectancy of Arctic residents. The success of the AEPS naturally led to discussions to elevate it from a strategy to an institution.

Negotiations began in 1995 to create a limited environmental governance body. Although all of the Arctic countries shared a vested interest in improving the state of the environment, Russia had the weakest environmental regulations. Given the Nordic countries’ close proximity to Russia, they strongly advocated for a Council (interviews 8 and 7) that would help keep Russia accountable (interview 10). Canadian officials agreed with the Nordic governments, and were optimistic that the AC could be a forum to give a voice to Arctic residents. Accordingly, Canadian and Nordic leaders sought a strong AC that would include representatives of Arctic Indigenous peoples as full members and that would produce binding decisions. The United States and Russia wanted a weaker, more ad-hoc body that, essentially, perpetuated the AEPS under a new name (interview 15).

During the negotiations, Russian officials seemed “extremely nonchalant” about environmental issues, espousing the view that “Russia is a gigantic country” (interview 7). In the midst of a recession which saw Russia’s economy shrink by half in the early 1990s, Russia’s government closed half of its environmental monitoring stations (interview 18) and downgraded its Ministry of the Environment from a ministry to a “state committee” (interview 10). While environmentalists (who tended to promote democracy in post-Soviet Russia) remained bitter that the Soviet system had failed to protect the environment and to prevent the Chernobyl disaster, “major oligarchs and industrial concerns” opposed environmental regulation and democracy (interview 10). Nevertheless, Russian officials acknowledged that participation in an AC would provide Russia with an opportunity to join the world community and secure international funding for environmental projects (interview 16).

A persistent strain of American thought viewed multilateral institutions and agreements with suspicion; US officials worried that a strong AC would impose undue restrictions on sovereignty and would become a venue for other states to criticize the United States (interview 1). The Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC), for example, stridently opposed various US policies, such as the 1972 Marine Mammals Protection Act, which banned the import of seal products; and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which unilaterally settled outstanding Indigenous land claims in that state (interview 1). American officials feared that including Indigenous peoples as voting members in an AC, with similar status to the Arctic states, would create a precedent to do so in other forums and affect ongoing negotiations to produce a United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (interview 14). Other environmental institutions already existed, and influential US officials believed that environmental issues required a global rather than a regional approach (interview 1). Nonetheless, the United States saw benefits in information sharing through an AC (interview 9).

Given this backdrop of state interests, the AC’s creation as a limited, soft-law body, rather than a formal multilateral organization, should come as little surprise. The 1998 Iqaluit Declaration specified that its role was to “provide a means for promoting co-operation, coordination and interaction among the Arctic States … with the involvement of the Arctic Indigenous communities and other Arctic inhabitants on common Arctic issues, in particular issues of sustainable development and environmental protection in the Arctic,” but not military security, as stated in a footnote (Arctic Council, 1998). Framers deliberately excluded traditional military security from the Council’s mandate, but included sustainable development, thus adding a human dimension to the environmental focus of the AEPS. Environmental security became the AC’s main focus, but the Arctic states’ foreign affairs departments would administer the institution’s work. Although the AC was not conceived as a formal policy-making body, nothing in its founding documents forbid the future possibility. It would not have a permanent secretariat, but the chairmanship of the institution would rotate every two years. Observer states and non-governmental organizations would attend AC meetings without a formal role or weight in deliberations. Indigenous peoples’ organizations would participate as Permanent Participants at the main table as non-voting members – lacking the status of the Arctic states, but an international breakthrough nevertheless. As a consensus-based forum, the AC would hold bi-annual meetings to oversee progress on projects and share findings.

Four major takeaways about the founding of the AC emerge:

1. the AC is the major governance institution for the Arctic region because it includes all of the Arctic states as members;
2. it is not an international forum, but rather a regional forum, because the role of non-Arctic states is limited, largely absent in the founding of the institution;
3. the Arctic states dictate the structure and content of the institution; and,
4. the AC began life as an environmental body, but the reasons for the creation of the institution were not completely environmental in nature.

In the years that followed, the AC assumed a generative role by completing monitoring projects, drafting action plans, and producing science-based assessments, such as projects on biodiversity and persistent organic pollutants.¹ Disagreements arose regarding its role in policy-making and the elasticity of its mandate as states wrestled with the forum’s limitations. At the AC’s November 1999 meeting in Washington, the United States proposed to give a joint presentation with Russia on the Arctic Military Environmental Co-operation Group, which aimed to reduce the environmental impact of military vehicles in the Arctic. Canada’s delegation vetoed the discussion immediately as falling outside the mandate of the AC because it concerned military security. At the same meeting, the delegations of Sweden and Norway proposed the creation of a formal policy to codify national commitments to mitigate PCB contamination in the Arctic Contaminant Action Plan (ACAP). The meeting minutes reported “that delegates should be prepared to negotiate final text for the strategy component of the [ACAP] plan at the next meeting” (with Finland, Iceland, and Denmark in support). Canada again vetoed the creation of formal policy as an intrusion on state sovereignty. “As far as using the ACAP as a coordinated approach in international fora, Canada stated that the Council must continue to rely on individual states to take action,” the minutes noted. In support, the ICC asserted that the ACAP plan represented “a concerted effort to look after needs of indigenous people in the Arctic” (Arctic Council, 1999). These disagreements about the AC’s role would continue.

Although the policy-making role and mandate of the AC has grown over the past two decades, the legal character of the body has not. The Council acts as a catalyst, assuming the role of convenor facilitating co-operation between member states and offering a co-operative platform to launch substantive initiatives. Global interests in the Arctic peaked in 2007, with actions by some member states spurring concerns about the prospect of...