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Form and Function: The Future of the Arctic Council

Participants at the 10th Ministerial Meeting of the Arctic Council in Fairbanks, Alaska, USA 11 May 2017. Photo: Arctic Council Secretariat

Since its establishment in 1996, the Arctic Council has evolved to become an indispensable forum for regional Arctic cooperation. Expectations for the forum were initially modest, but as the Arctic region has increased in political prominence, so too has the Arctic Council. In 2018, members of the University of the Arctic Thematic Network on Geopolitics and Security even nominated the Arctic Council for the Nobel Peace Prize, calling it, “a model for regional governance”.

The function of the Arctic Council has been largely defined by the form imposed upon it in the Ottawa Declaration on the Establishment of the Arctic Council. Arguably, among its most distinctive features are:

• The inheritance of the Working Groups from the 1991 Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy;
• A lack of legal personality as an international organisation;
• A lack of defined financial contributions;
• The inclusion of Indigenous representatives as Permanent Participants;
• Its constitution as a consensus based forum; and
• The exclusion of military security from its agenda.

The Arctic and the global context have evolved substantially since regional cooperation was initiated over two decades ago. Therefore, it is worthwhile to ask what reforms of the Arctic Council are required given the governance needs of the contemporary political situation, yet still practicable given the constraints of path dependence.

The Arctic Council itself has recognized the need to reassess its form to allow for improved function. Most recently, the 2017 Fairbanks Declaration saw the Arctic States:

Recognize that the Arctic Council continues to evolve, responding to new opportunities and challenges in the Arctic, and instruct the Senior Arctic Officials to develop a strategic plan based on the Arctic Council’s foundational documents and subsidiary body strategies and guiding documents, for approval by Ministers in 2019.

It is in this context that we submit for consideration an analysis of what works well in the Arctic Council, where there are inadequacies, and what role it can most effectively play in Arctic politics.

What Works Well

The greatest success of the Arctic Council has been its role in keeping the Arctic peaceful and stable since the end of the Cold War, despite rapid changes in the region’s environmental, political, and socio-economic circumstances. It has so far managed to navigate conventional geopolitical tensions, fomented by Russian revisionism, as well as recent challenges to international liberalism, exhibited by American isolationism under Trump. Several institutional features have facilitated its resilience. Because the Ottawa Declaration inhibits discussions on military security, the Arctic Council has been able to avoid becoming embroiled in recent tensions in global politics. Although most military cooperation between the West and Russia was suspended in 2014 following the annexation of Crimea, no tangible impact on Arctic Council activities occurred. Remarkably, the Arctic Coast Guard Forum, following from the 2011 Agreement on Cooperation on Aeronautical and Maritime Search and Rescue in the Arctic, was still established in 2015 despite the suspension of other cooperation. States have been persuaded to compartmentalize Arctic Council affairs from broader geopolitical matters.

Another significant achievement has been the inclusion of Indigenous voices since its inception. The creation of the Permanent Participant (PP) category, which gives representatives of Indigenous organizations a seat at every table, has led to an institutional culture that values local perspectives, respects traditional knowledge, and promotes self-determination.

A third achievement is the Arctic Council’s capacity to translate knowledge and expertise into policy advice. For example, it has facilitated knowledge synthesis on environmental change in ways that have influenced global policy development regarding pollutants, most notably through the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and the Minamata Convention on Mercury. Through its high calibre work, facilitated by its Working Groups and their expert networks, the Council has positioned itself as an important “policy shaping” institution.

The institution of Task Forces, first introduced in 2009, to work on specific issues for a limited amount of time, has furthermore provided the Arctic Council with a vehicle to deliver concrete outcomes. These include, amongst others, the three agreements that have arisen from the Council; the creation of the Arctic Economic Council; and the establishment of a permanent Secretariat in 2013. The establishment of the Task Force category also shows the Arctic Council’s ability and willingness to reassess its organizational structure and negotiate new arrangements.

What Needs Improvement

Although the Arctic Council has a good foundation, it is constrained in significant ways. The first of these is funding. While the Arctic Council Secretariat seems adequately funded (1.24 million USD in 2017, with Norway contributing half), it has very little discretionary funding. Similarly, the Working Groups rely on one or two states to fund a secretariat but have limited ongoing project funds. Almost all activities are funded on an ad hoc basis by the states who advocated for them and by individual experts who secure their own funding through national channels. Thus, all too often it is funding that drives projects, not projects that drive funding. This makes it difficult to be strategic with planning, or to organize new activities beyond a one or two year window. Moreover, funding to support the capacity and participation of Permanent Participants is a constant source of concern. The establishment of the widely publicized Álgu Fund, conceptualized as a “capacity-building endowment” has not been successful in addressing this challenge as of yet.

While the Arctic Council has made good progress on becoming more transparent in recent years through its open access archive, it still struggles to be accountable to stakeholders, northerners, and taxpayers. This is not for lack of effort, but due to its structure. It has a voluntary character, which prevents binding commitments. Ministerial Declarations contain many subjective statements that are difficult to account for, and no formal efforts are made to assess them. A tracking tool, the Amarok, has been established to document life cycle phases of various projects and initiatives, but there are no resources to systematically measure progress on outcomes, value for money/effort, or implementation, or to provide ongoing monitoring.

There has been perennial confusion about the role and relationship of Observers, especially with regard to non-Arctic states. Although recent Chairs have made greater efforts to engage Observers, there is still a prevailing sense of frustration. Most agree that the opportunity for greater contributions exists and will become increasingly important with both the rise of Asian investment and influence in the 21^st century and the global effects of climate change.

Related to this is the rather muted role of northern regional governments such as Alaska, Greenland, the Canadian territories, northern Nordic municipalities, and Russian Arctic okrugs, republics, krais, and oblasts. Often imbued with more democratic authority from northerners than the Permanent Participants, and frequently responsible for the actual delivery of sustainable development and environmental protection initiatives, regional governments nonetheless have no formal association with the Arctic Council. States may include them on delegations and/or consult with them to varying degrees, and they have formed a loose association as the Northern Forum, a non-governmental Observer to the Arctic Council. But it is becoming increasingly difficult for the Arctic Council to advance its mandate without more formal cooperation and communication with regions.

Respecting sustainable development, it would be difficult to argue that the Arctic Council has had a broad impact. As is well known, the Ottawa Declaration identified “sustainable development” and “environmental protection” as issues of particular focus for the Arctic Council. However in practice environmental protection has received the lion’s share of attention, resources and outcomes. Education, health services, and local infrastructure—the fundamentals of developmen—are expensive public services that the Arctic Council has neither the funding nor the mandate to address. Development in the Arctic has a local and subnational nature that any international-level organization is unsuited to address. The Sustainable Development Working Group deliverables generally include reports, toolkits, guidelines, and workshops; all valuable efforts but hard to correlate to measurable improvement in well-being and human development indicators, such as a reduction in suicide rates or increases in household access to indoor plumbing and potable water.

With regards to economic development, the very topic was relatively taboo in regional politics until recent years, as it was synonymous in the Arctic with resource exploitation. Efforts to promote economic development have been mostly relegated to the Arctic Economic Council (AEC), an independent organization of business representatives facilitated by the Arctic Council in 2014. The AEC has limited capacity and its relationship with the Arctic Council—participation, reporting, support, etc.—remains ambiguous.

Irrespective of the AEC’s competence or influence, it does not remove the Arctic Council’s responsibility to clarify its role and enhance its capacity to inform policy in this field. It is not yet clear what practical measures the Arctic Council could take to promote regional economic growth, aside from the important tasks of maintaining political stability and promoting cross-border relationships. Some argue, however, that the Arctic Council can play a stronger policy shaping role in ensuring that the AEC and its business-oriented membership find support for transboundary initiatives that build sustainable regional economic development, and are able to work within a relatively uniform framework of internationally agreed upon practices and protocols. Several initiatives such as the Arctic Investment Protocol have identified pathways to creating an Arctic-specific set of Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) best practices.

Part of the challenge of working in the realm of sustainable development is the inherent difficulty in transferring knowledge across culturally and linguistically diverse contexts, where many places experience relatively low educational attainment, overstretched human capacity, competing demands, and expensive internet and transportation connectivity. The question remains if a forum largely populated by diplomats is an optimal, or even good, conductor of knowledge on sustainable development issues.

The elephant in the room in regional Arctic politics is climate change. No conversation is complete—from traditional knowledge to shipping to sanitation infrastructure to wildlife protection—without referencing climate change and its impacts. And yet, the Arctic Council has no expert group, no task force, and no working group devoted exclusively to it. The frequent reluctance of American and Russian, and occasionally other, governments to openly accept and commit to mitigating climate change through reducing greenhouse gases, let alone discuss the challenges of adapting to a necessary post-petroleum future, has precluded the Council from addressing one of the major threats to sustainable development and environmental protection in the region. The Arctic Council’s lack of efforts to mitigate climate change is a weakness. Yet, it has also managed better than any other regional forum to document, inform, and prioritize climate change impacts and potential adaptation actions, beginning with the landmark 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, and followed more recently with the three sub-regional assessments of Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic.

Finally, there is the question of Working Groups. The bulk of activity in the Arctic Council arises from the six Working Groups [Arctic Contaminants Action Program (ACAP), Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP), Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF), Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response (EPPR), Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment (PAME) and the Sustainable Development Working Group (SDWG)]. The Working Group structure was inherited from the 1991 Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS), from which AMAP, CAFF, EPPR, and PAME were absorbed—a product of the particular challenges and opportunities that were becoming apparent at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, especially regarding pollution in the Barents region and long-range transport of persistent pollutants. The SDWG was established in 1998 and ACAP in 2006. They largely consist of government officials, scientists, and other stakeholders with expertise or a vested interest in their mandates.

The Ottawa Declaration called on states to “oversee and coordinate the programs established under the AEPS”; nonetheless, as a forum, it proscribed no formal reporting structure or hierarchy. As it happened, the Working Groups have developed unique and divergent organizational designs, largely dependent on the incorporation laws of the states which host their secretariats and the amount of funding they receive.¹⁾There is a vast difference, for example, between the capacity, funding and influence of AMAP versus ACAP. Working Groups conduct many projects and meetings, but it is difficult to measure their relative effectiveness. As mentioned, the category of Task Force was established in 2009 seemingly to provide the Arctic Council with a better means by which to advance time-sensitive, policy-oriented initiatives.

There is no question that the quality of work done by Working Groups is high, and that those involved are strongly committed. But it is fair to ask: are the current six Working Groups the right Working Groups? While the coordinating and agenda setting power of the Arctic Council is valuable, could the work be conducted more productively with a different organizational structure? And could more of the curiosity-driven scientific work be conducted through the traditional means of research done by academics, researchers, governments, and NGOs? How can the advantages of circumpolar collaboration in assessment processes and the networks they have built be kept and developed, while creating greater flexibility and interdisciplinarity? The subject itself is sensitive, but the discussion is overdue.

All in all, while the Arctic Council has made significant and important contributions to Arctic and global governance, especially in terms of peace building and environmental protection, it clearly has constraints, both institutional and otherwise, that inhibits its effectiveness.

Better Left Alone

It is a truism that someone’s greatest strength is often their greatest weakness. So it is with the Arctic Council. A few of its core institutional features have both pros and cons, but changing them would add unnecessary risk to the integrity of the forum.

Much has been made about the Arctic Council’s lack of legal personality as an international organization; as a condition of US involvement in the 1990s, the Arctic Council was established as a consensus-based forum, not a treaty organization. States have not committed to abide by its decisions nor have they granted the organization any independent law-making authority. Thus, there are no ‘votes’ because no state is obliged to go along with the will of the majority of the group. The three legally binding agreements to come out of the Arctic Council are described as falling ‘under its auspices’.

There is an argument to be made that a more formal legal structure would strengthen the Arctic Council, and allow it to be more vigorous in implementing and monitoring policies such as environmental regulations. However, the informal nature of the partnership has allowed it to be flexible, accommodate the interests of different states, and adapt to varying levels of readiness to adopt and enforce new national legislation (e.g. stricter environmental regulations). Importantly, it has also allowed for the full involvement of the Permanent Participants, whereas a legal international institution would by definition exclude them from decision-making, as they have no obligations under international law.

It is also worth noting that the Arctic Council’s lack of a legal personality as an international organization has not prevented it from being involved in discussions, primarily through its Working Groups, that have led the Arctic states to enter into legally binding agreements outside of the forum’s parameters. These include, for example, the International Maritime Organization’s Polar Code (2017). In addition international environmental conventions with global scope by definition apply to the Arctic as well, with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982), the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (2001), and the Minamata Convention on Mercury (2013), mentioned above, having particularly strong significance in the region. Making the Arctic Council a treaty-based organization may be a solution to a problem that does not exist.

The Ottawa Declaration set in place the Arctic Council’s two year rotating Chairmanship, which began with Canada in 1998 and ended with Sweden in 2013 before beginning the cycle anew. The short-term length has its detractors, as it has led to a lack of continuity in the Arctic Council’s work. New agendas are introduced every second year that often reflect the domestic interests of the host country more than the needs of the region: the Circumpolar Business Forum (later Arctic Economic Council) for Canada, Regional Seas Program for USA, and meteorological cooperation for Finland, as examples. New projects are piled upon old projects, and very little stocktaking is done across Chairmanships.

At the same time, the rotating Chairmanship has ensured that every state, at least periodically, becomes heavily invested in the success of the Council, and develops familiarity with the forum and its inner workings. The establishment of the permanent Secretariat in Tromsø in 2013 removed many of the most glaring issues with the rotating Chairmanship by providing a central depository of Arctic Council documents, consolidating communications with internal and external stakeholders, ensuring consistent meeting organization, and providing institutional memory across Chairmanships. Removing, shortening, or lengthening the Chairmanship role would likely impose as many new challenges as it would solve.

Role Definition

The most important thing the Arctic Council can do to improve its form (the structure of the institution) and function (the goals it pursues) is to look closely at its role. First, what areas require policy action in the Arctic? Currently the Arctic Council and its Working Groups are effective, even prolific, gatherers of common Arctic policy issues. But it needs to do a much better job of asking the next question: What policy issues can only be tackled by the Arctic Council? These include primarily transboundary maritime and environmental issues which are too big to be dealt with nationally, and too region-specific to be dealt with globally; or are issues that require the intervention of foreign ministries for some reason, such as to champion a pressing issue, coordinate activity, synchronize legislation, share otherwise unattainable data, or develop agreements. Black carbon mitigation, migratory bird protection, regional SAR collaboration, and an Arctic observing network are examples.

This naturally leads to other questions: What can others do better? Is the Arctic Council the best place to address mental health issues in the region, for example? Or is that best done at a local and sub-regional level? Is it realistic to assume that the Arctic Council would be able to address climate change mitigation? Or is a focus on the local, national, and global levels a more realistic way forward for mitigation?

There is furthermore a perception that the Arctic Council is the high level intergovernmental forum for Arctic affairs, when in fact there are myriad other organisations that are specialised in addressing regionally relevant issues: the Arctic Coast Guard Forum, the Arctic Economic Council, the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, and the International Maritime Organization, to name just a few.

There is value in having the Arctic Council raise the profile of pertinent issues, such as access to education, sanitation, or internet connectivity. The forum has agenda setting power and can mobilize resources and action by prioritizing issues within Arctic state and Observer governments. The involvement of Permanent Participants lends it greater credibility and social licence. But to avoid spreading sparse resources too thin, it should consider what issues others are better equipped to address.

The Arctic Council in 2019 and Beyond

Based on this assessment of the Arctic Council’s strengths and weaknesses, we offer these recommendations to improve the Arctic Council’s form and function as it undergoes a strategic planning process:

1. Evaluate, and if warranted overhaul, the Working Group structure: their thematic focus, relationship to SAOs, funding arrangements, policy relevance, and expectations.
2. Ensure that the Arctic Council has the appropriate capacity and resources, through a Working Group, Task Force or some other dedicated mechanism, to take on the key challenge of climate change mitigation.
3. Address capacity issues with more stable core funding and the creation of a substantial project fund to enhance the timeliness, sustainability, and effectiveness of what are determined to be the Council’s most vital activities. The existing Project Support Instrument, a merit-based financing tool focused on pollution prevention, abatement and elimination, could be a genesis of such a fund, but is not an ideal model as it currently stands.
4. Limit the Arctic Council’s role to functions which only it can perform, and be more comfortable devolving work and resources to more appropriate bodies as needed (as has been done with e.g. fisheries and shipping).
5. More formally engage with sub-national governments by encouraging states to support their participation in relevant Working Groups projects.
6. Expand the Amarok tracking tool to more comprehensively evaluate, rather than simply track, the performance and outcomes of Arctic Council projects. Avoid having reports as a project outcome in and of themselves.
7. Embrace a knowledge transfer role, as opposed to a policy development role, on relevant issues of sustainable development, such as sanitation, local energy infrastructure, internet connectivity, economic development, cold climate technologies, and adaptation to future changes in climate and the global energy system.
8. Continue to maintain good international relations and compartmentalize global geopolitical issues outside the Council.

The Arctic Council is a model for global governance. It is inclusive of Indigenous perspectives, committed to evidence based decision-making, and a champion of regional peace and stability. But its needs and demands have evolved in the past twenty-two years, and the Council itself has wisely determined it is time to reevaluate its form to reflect its desired function. We applaud these efforts to strengthen the institution and submit these recommendations in humble support of this endeavour.

The authors are members of the UArctic Thematic Network on Geopolitics and Security.