Role Theory, Environmental Politics, and Learning in International Relations

The Case of the Arctic Region

Sandra Engstrand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000393194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this book, Sandra Engstrand uses role theory to study learning processes in environmental policy negotiations in the Arctic Council.

Owing to rapid ice-melting in the Arctic region, and more accessible commercial opportunities, there is a greater need for environmental protection. However, large sections of the Arctic fall under state jurisdiction, often causing tensions to arise that prevent any cooperation from achieving fully efficient environmental protection. To enhance our understanding on how states learn about environmental norms, Engstrand examines negotiation processes on environmental protection for the prevention of Arctic marine oil spills and the reduction of short-lived climate pollutants. Through interviews with state representatives and through text analyses of nearly twenty years of meetings between Senior Arctic Officials from each of the eight Arctic states, Engstrand suggests that learning on environmental norms runs firstly through a learning of roles in international relations. She demonstrates how member states develop through self-reflection and by considering the expectation of others, concluding that states' wishes to preserve their social role in a group and to be perceived as Arctic 'cooperators' are drivers for a social education on environmental norms.

A timely and unmatched volume Role Theory, Environmental Politics, and Learning in International Relations will engage students and academic researchers in international relations, environmental governance, and Arctic politics.

1Introduction

Learning in Arctic Environmental Cooperation

Introduction

The Arctic region is in desperate need of enhanced environmental governance, or, in the lingua of this book, of international learning. Over the past fifty years, the Arctic temperature has rapidly increased, with an average warming of two to three times higher than the global average (IPCC, 2018). The ice and frozen tundra have long symbolized this region, but now these symbols of the Arctic are in decline. Climate change has caused the permafrost to thaw, the sea ice to melt, and glaciers to increasingly calve into the Arctic Ocean. As early as 2030, or soon thereafter, it is expected that most of the Arctic will be free of ice during late summer. The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) – a scientific working group (WG) under Arctic Council – has described the Arctic to undergo a transformation, stretching beyond visual ice-melting to its aftereffects of ecological changes and disruptions (AMAP, 2017). Indeed, Arctic warming has turned not only into a regional catastrophe by severely affecting many indigenous communities with traditional ways of Arctic living, but also as a catastrophe for the world at large because an Arctic region lost to uncontrolled ice-melting and thawing permafrost will have the world soon to follow.¹

It takes an international learning on environmental norms to have this negative and downward warming trend dampened. Following J. Knopf (2003), such learning should be shared amongst actors and it should be progressive, adhering to norms benefitting nature. History has before showed international society capable of curving critical and downward trend in emissions and species extinction, for instance, by implementing regulations on ozone depleting substances and whale hunting alike, to mention a few. On the contrary, history has also revealed international society being, for too long, impervious to scientists’ repeated message of the causal linkages between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. The Arctic region is not only vulnerable to global warming, but its nature and ecosystem are particularly fragile and vulnerable to marine oil spills too. The continuous extraction of Arctic oil and gas, both on and offshore, is a telling example of commercial interests yet to face a counterpart – i.e., an environmental norm – strong enough to have the state support withdrawn from environmentally risky activities.

How then do international relations learn of environmental values in such a way that what previously was an accepted behavior suddenly gets dated and perceived as harmful and obsolete? Obviously, the key would be to know about the problem, to have access to knowledge and scientific facts. But knowledge alone does not bring any learning to life – if so, many of the problems and horrors in the world would since long have been gone. It also takes another, more subtle thing; it takes the insight of the problem being precisely that – a problem. This book engages in a broader discussion on how a learning of environmental norms may come about, though it may be difficult to achieve. By applying a role theoretical perspective on International Relations (IR) in general and Arctic cooperation in particular, it is set to offer one piece to the puzzle on why knowledge and scientific facts alone seldom is enough to swiftly put an environmentally harmful activity on halt.

More specifically, the book approaches cooperation as a social learning process and argues that any learning on environmental norms firstly runs through a learning of roles in international relations. A state’s role, in turn, is suggested to be a stable although flexible construction, informed by situated understandings. At the book’s disposal are two negotiation processes that have been carried out by the Arctic Council in the years 2013–2015: marine oil spill prevention and reduction of short-lived climate pollutants, respectively. These case studies shed light on why there would be no such thing as an instant learning on environmental protection; instead it is suggested that a profound learning of environmental values by necessity must take time, time enough to allow for role-playing states to have their roles adapted to a new and somewhat changed script.

Approaching Learning Processes

In IR, it has for long been a well-known fact that laws and regulations aiming for environmental protection generally battle in headwind. Difficulties pertaining to, for instance, competitiveness and risks of free-riding do often put strains on what would be cooperatively possible to achieve. In the Arctic, preventive measures on environmental pollution are furthermore held back due to strong economic incentives, where the region’s vast resources of oil and gas, fish, minerals, and tourism all entail commercial promises that give rise to activities not always compatible with keeping pollution levels at a minimum for the sake of the environment. In various degrees, the Arctic states are all forced to relate to such economically informed interests, while nurturing the desire to have the region environmentally preserved and protected. Obviously, all environmental governance, Arctic and other, would be the result of interest leveling.

Rather than focusing on Global Environmental Governance (GEG) as a result, this book takes as a point of departure in the process of getting there, why do we – the Arctic states specifically and international actors in general – end up where we end up, when wrapping a negotiation session up? As the title of this book suggests, role theory, environmental politics, and learning are of interrelated relevance to the Arctic region. Indeed, the route towards greater Arctic environmental protection is argued to run through states’ learning about their (social) roles: the wish to obtain a specific position in a group is as much – or even more – of a driver for state learning of environmental norms than the actual environmental norm per se. The book sets out to investigate the following question: How do states learn of environmental norms? This question is broken down also in smaller areas of interests, providing different types of input regarding the following: how is the intertwinement between energy and environment expressed in the Arctic Council interaction, how is learning manifested within such interactive processes, and how do expectations serve to either encourage or constrain learning? Role theory is deemed well-suited to engage with the overarching question of how states learn of environmental norms, since the role concept acknowledges actors to be both socially reflective and sensitive to behavioral prescriptions, while adhering to an inner core of Self which cannot easily be disturbed. Indeed, the very act of role-playing is, just like learning, a process. From this perspective, the link between roles and learning could be manifested as role change (Aggestam, 2006; Harnisch, Frank and Maull, 2011; Harnish, 2012). To quote the example of a theater, roles are stable over time and they follow a (national) script, but they are also attentive to the director, co-actors, and audience, and therefore hold the potential for change.

“You’ll try to get an agreement on things where, you think, it will be possible to agree,” a state representative with extensive experience of the Arctic Council explained, “because, if you get one agreement, you may be able to get another, which then will increase the amount of understanding between interested nations.” The words are dedicated to what the general negotiation strategy of the Arctic state would be on a topic like oil spill prevention. Not only do they point toward the importance of a micro perspective to grant access to learning processes, but correlate with how this book foresees that negotiations and cooperation on Arctic environmental protection can be made progressive, as a stepwise and contextually anchored process, where actors little by little have their roles and perceptions altered. Indeed, to have actors to meet, and after having met, to meet again and again seems to be the socializing recipe benefitting the Arctic environment.

This chapter discusses how roles and role-playing is a good way to approach state behavior as pervious to social interaction. It also discusses norms as mattering in IR, including the norm of environmental responsibility. It ends with a discussion of the micro perspective as constituting an analytical bridge between norms and behavior, thereby rendering learning in IR less abstract. Discussions carried out at this level is set to contribute to the understanding of how global environmental protection in the end is a learning process originating in reflections, perceptions, understandings, and expectations found in the ‘small.’ The closing section of this chapter presents the Arctic case studies and methods relied on for subsequent discussions on learning processes.

Arctic Role-Playing

In recent years, the Arctic has gained increased attention in media and news reports, bringing to fore an urgent need for strong Arctic cooperation on environmental protection. Since 1996 the Arctic Council (hereinafter the AC), an intergovernmental organization, has gathered states and indigenous associations to interact in what today represents perhaps the most stable and encompassing institution for cooperation in the Arctic (Dodds, 2013; Nord, 2016a; 2016b). The eight Arctic member states are: Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the U.S. According to the founding statue, cooperation should be promoted “on common Arctic issues,” in particular on issues of sustainable development and environmental protection in the Arctic, while matters pertaining to militarily security are explicitly excluded (Ottawa Declaration, Art. 1a). Although it was formally established in the mid 1990s, the idea to bring the Arctic states close to one another through Arctic cooperation dates to the Cold War era. In a now famous speech, Mikhail Gorbachev declared the Arctic region to represent the opportunity of a peace zone, where also the environment would have much to gain from the burying of nuclear arms and agony. In 1989, on the initiative of Finland, the eight Arctic states agreed to the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS), thereby stipulating environmental cooperation as the way forward for not only the region, but one may presume, Arctic relations alike.

The Arctic region has been described as a different, even unique, regionalization process due to its attempt to enhance Arctic governance while yet being constituted by competing interests and discourses. The Arctic Council has similarly been considered a unique model for peace- and stability-building (Albert and Vasilache, 2017; Brigham et al., 2016). Contributing to this view is the acknowledgment of the importance of having also indigenous representation to inform the decision-making process, moving the intergovernmental cooperation beyond state perspectives strictly.

In the last decade, international cooperation in general seems to be waning. Multilateralism has suffered from setbacks. For instance, in Europe, the EU has lost one of its members to Brexit and temporary border controls have been reintroduced in the otherwise border-free Schengen area as a response to first migration and the coronavirus pandemic. In the U.S., the Paris Agreement has been withdrawn, and steps have been taken to a formal withdrawal from also the World Health Organization. Neither has the Arctic cooperation turned out immune to global events. A good example is the eruption of the Crimea conflict in 2014, which, although not occurring in the Arctic region per se, yet created serious concerns over Russia’s military behavior (remilitarization) heading also the Arctic. However, whereas relations with Russia were damaged, both bi- and multilateral ones, its effect on Arctic Council cooperation was moderate (Burke, 2019). Here, in the AC, cooperation has withstood. Common Arctic interests, in addition to an identified need to externally show themselves united as Arctic actors to be able to address and deliver on internal problem, have been suggested as what spurs continuous Arctic cooperation (ibid.:173).

The...