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Costs and Reality of Reforming the Arctic Council

By | Commentary
April 9, 2019
Small flags on a table

Flags of Arctic States and Permanent Participant organizations at the Arctic Council Senior Arctic Officials’ meeting in Finland in March 2019. Photo: Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland

The first Arctic Council (AC) strategic plan expected at the Ministerial Meeting in May 2019, like the Council’s 20th anniversary three years ago, presents a good occasion to debate the AC’s strengths, accomplishments, and weaknesses alike. Whereas much of the criticism of the Council has remained relatively constant throughout its lifetime, for instance the lack of the AC’s follow-up of its own guidelines, a fairly similar observation could be made about some of the recommendations for reforming the Arctic Council, including several of those presented by the authors of the article Form and Function: The Future of the Arctic Council, published on The Arctic Institute on 5 February 2019.

While some of the suggestions to improve the Council’s efficiency and effectiveness are of indisputable importance and appear relatively straightforward—providing the AC with more stable funding and securing steady financial support to Permanent Participants, for example—some others deserve more careful consideration. In many cases, the devil lies in the details. Thus, the aim of this response is to draw attention to certain aspects of the proposals put forward by the authors of the above article, which was published on The Arctic Institute in early February 2019. Those aspects—among others, the costs of potential restructuring or the ultimate nature of collaboration in the AC—are rarely raised in discussions about changes in the Council (and neither in the mentioned piece), and yet appear to be worth noting, especially if the recommendations were to be put into practice. In highlighting them, this response hopes to contribute to advancing our debates about the AC— both within the scholarly community as well as in dialogues with practitioners.

First, one of the more commonly raised recommendations has been the restructuring of the AC’s Working Groups, a majority of which have been inherited from the Council’s predecessor, the environmentally-focused Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS). The proposals for this change were put forward in a study by Pekka Haavisto as early as the first Finnish chairmanship of the Arctic Council (2000-2002). This was followed by Norwegian suggestions during its time at the helm of the Council (2006-2009) and accompanied by much bolder ideas for reform of the entire AC’s structure proposed more recently by the WWF.

Similarly to these previous studies, the authors of the article Form and Function raise a relevant question as to whether the current six Working Groups are “the right Working Groups.” They ask if the work in the Council “could be conducted more productively with a different organizational structure”. They also inquire how to create greater flexibility and interdisciplinarity while keeping and developing existing and operating networks—a discussion they label as already “overdue.”

Without going into specifics of any of the above proposals, there is a point that all of them—including the one about restructuring the Working Groups by Exner-Pirot et al.—seem to miss: the costs of any institutional or organizational restructuring. Even if we put aside a matter of financial costs (which is not a trivial issue in an organisation without a stable budget), the aspect that comes to the forefront is how to avoid or minimize the interruption to the workflow of the AC’s Working Groups in the transition period.

Perhaps the best illustration of the scale of challenge that any major restructuring of the Council would incur is when the AMAP Secretariat was relocated from Oslo, where it was located since 1991, to Tromsø in April 2018. The decision on relocation was taken by Norwegian authorities and announced to AMAP members and participants, among whom this move raised many concerns. One of the most important points they stressed was how to ensure that AMAP could continue its work during the transition period and produce its deliverables on time. For those of us who observe the work of the Arctic Council from the sidelines, it is important to note that these concerns were raised when the only issue was the physical relocation of the Secretariat between two cities in the same country. There were no major changes to the AMAP structure or mandate.

With that incident in mind, it becomes perhaps more apparent of how tall order an overall refurbishing of all the Arctic Council Working Groups would be. In order not to bring more harm than good to the work of the AC, such a change would need to be meticulously planned and executed and, even then, its final result and success would remain highly uncertain. Overall, even if Arctic states reached an agreement on restructuring the Working Groups, it is always worth remembering the costs associated with such change, including those related to financial implications and mundane logistical details as well as institutional and output interruption.

Secondly, in their recommendations, the authors of Form and Function propose granting the AC “appropriate capacity and resources (…) to take on the key challenge of climate change mitigation.” It is beyond dispute that climate change and its impacts are among the most important stressors and challenges in the Arctic. The authors raise a more interesting point, however, by suggesting to endow the Council with the capacities required to mitigate climate change. This means, in principle, capacities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions via means such as improved energy efficiency, increased use of renewable energy sources, carbon sequestration, or sustainable transport initiatives.

This, however, begs the question of what capacities, concretely, the authors have in mind. The AC has already recently engaged more actively in black carbon mitigation through its Framework for Action on Enhanced Black Carbon and Methane Emissions Reductions, even if the success of this initiative is at the moment debatable and the results remain yet to be seen. The Sustainable Development Working Group has also had several locally-oriented projects aimed at improving the access of Arctic communities to clean, affordable, and reliable energy sources (like the Arctic Renewable Energy Atlas (AREA) or the Arctic Remote Energy Networks Academy (ARENA) initiative, for example). As limited as these actions are, it is unclear what kind of efforts the Council could effectively assume beyond those – yet, this point remains, unfortunately, unaddressed by the authors of the Form and Function article.

Perhaps even more important are the questions of, first, why the Arctic Council would be the right body to undertake grand-scale climate change mitigation efforts. And, secondly, as the authors appear to suggest implicitly in the section about defining the AC’s role, is climate change mitigation indeed the policy issue that can only be tackled by the Council? This remains doubtful if we consider the inherently global nature of climate change processes and the demands for global action to counteract them. There is certainly scope for AC action and advancement in this area and, as shown, the work of the Council can complement the overarching international climate and air pollution frameworks in important ways. Yet, it is very difficult to conceive how the AC could effectively take on the key challenge of climate change mitigation—in particular in light of its own institutional nature as an intergovernmental body, as noted in the last point below.

The authors of Form and Function themselves remark that oftentimes several Arctic states have been reluctant “to openly accept and commit to mitigating climate change through reducing greenhouse gases,” which consequently has “precluded the Council from addressing one of the major threats to sustainable development and environmental protection in the region.” Notwithstanding, the authors continue from there that “the Arctic Council’s lack of efforts to mitigate climate change is a weakness.”

As easy as it is to say and to support the statement that not engaging in climate change mitigation – the societal challenge of our time – is a weakness for the AC—even if this author does not necessarily agree with that—it is also hard to see any resolution to this situation. We need to bear in mind that the AC is exactly this, the reflection of what all Arctic states are able to agree on. Or, at least, what they do not feel too strongly about to explicitly oppose it during AC meetings and in ministerial declarations. Whereas institutions sometimes acquire a voice of their own and the capacity to speak beyond what states strictly subscribe to, it does not appear that the AC is at this stage of its evolution, let alone whether it will ever be there.

This point is also of a more general nature when it comes to our comprehension and writing about the Council. Whereas formulations such as “the Arctic Council is doing” or “should do something” are common and very handy shortcuts in our communication about the AC, they also should never obfuscate the ultimately intergovernmental nature of cooperation in the Council. This fact sometimes seems to be lost in debates about the AC and, yet, it might be worth readdressing as we move on in our discussions about the potential and limitations of the Arctic Council as a model for global governance. The opening line of each AC Ministerial Declaration – “We, the Ministers representing the eight Arctic States” – might propose a hint as to where at least some of the reform suggestions for the AC should be directed to instead.

Gosia Smieszek is a researcher at the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland.