Governing Arctic Change - Global Perspectives

Photo: Courtney Weaver

The Arctic is inextricably linked with climate, environmental and socio-economic processes that originate or are determined by places far beyond what anyone would still define as ‘Arctic’, widely acknowledged as all areas north of the Arctic Circle. In short, what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic and often also does not originate in the Arctic.

Arctic-global interactions – A two-way street

According to the IPCC’s climate change report published in March 2014, sea-level rise in the Pacific region as a direct consequence of global warming, including the retreat of the Greenland ice sheet, is a major threat to the coastal zones of low-lying atoll islands. Rising sea levels will inevitably necessitate comprehensive adaptation measures including, as a last resort, the relocation of people and entire communities.¹⁾Wong, P.P., et al. (2014) Coastal Systems and Low-Lying Areas, in Field, C.B., et al. (Eds.), Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (pp. 361–409). Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.

In September 2014, President Anote Tong of Kiribati, one of those island states in the Pacific Ocean, went on an Arctic expedition to witness the transformations taking place in that far-away region first-hand and – as he stated in his address to the UN General Assembly in New York a week later – to attain a ‘wider perspective of the immensity of what is at stake beyond our own immediate concerns. This visit to the Arctic highlighted the stark reality of the very direct connection between the destruction of this polar region to what is happening to us in the equatorial region’.²⁾Tong, A. (2014) Statement by H.E. President Anote Tong at 69th UN General Assembly. 26 September, New York, p. 4, http://www.un.org/en/ga/69/meetings/gadebate/pdf/KI_en.pdf. Accessed on 20 January 2016

This polar–pacific connection is not a one-way street, though. Another island state of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, is the world’s third largest registry for offshore rigs and vessels deployed worldwide for the development of oil and gas resources located in maritime areas. Two rigs under Marshallese flag, the Polar Pioneer operated by Shell and the Transocean Spitsbergen by Statoil, headed for exploratory drills in Arctic waters in 2014 and 2015, respectively, which would have, had they been successful,³⁾Royal Dutch Shell terminated the contract that was to expire in July 2017 for the Polar Pioneer drilling rig with the company Transocean Ltd. Already in December 2015 as a consequence of its decision to abandon its Arctic drilling plans off the coast of Alaska in the summer of 2015. As of early 2016, the Transocean Spitsbergen drilling rig is still in operation for Norwegian Statoil. further contributed to carbon dioxide emissions and global climate change that threaten the vulnerable islands in the Pacific region in the first place. The raising awareness and political salience of these interdependencies have led former Marshallese Foreign Minister Tony de Brum to announce that the country considers prohibiting the business of oil rig registration.⁴⁾Mathiesen, K. (2015) Marshall Islands May Stop Registering Oil Rigs, Says Foreign Minister. The Guardian, 13 March, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/13/marshall-islands-may-stop-registering-oil-rigs-in-future-says-foreign-minister. Accessed on 19 January 2016

Arctic as a globally embedded space

Despite these examples, Arctic transformations and their governance have thus far been treated predominantly through a purely regional lens. The two-way relationships between Arctic and global change processes demands, however, that we understand the Arctic as a ‘globally embedded space’ that is inextricably linked to global climatic, environmental, economic and political systems and processes.

Against this background, we are not so much concerned with changes in the Arctic itself, but with the global root causes of Arctic developments and, in turn, the wider implications thereof for world politics and the way actors and institutions on various levels of governance respond to Arctic change. Thus, we consider it increasingly pointless to define and debate the Arctic as a distinctive region according to some definite geographical or geophysical thresholds or otherwise political, legal or cultural characteristics. Of course, those social constructs exist and do so for good reasons, for example, as a source of empowerment and self-legitimization of Arctic residents and their local identities, the formulation, implementation and assessment of regional strategies and policies by political decision-makers, or simply as a practical tool of political analysis for researchers in which ‘the Arctic as a subsystem has its own key actors, properties and logic’⁵⁾Wegge, N. (2011) The Political Order in the Arctic: Power Structures, Regimes and Influence. Polar Record 47(2): p. 166..

Yet, a southern boundary of the Arctic is not easily defined, or more precisely, varied definitions of such a southern boundary exist and are also applied for instance by Arctic Council Working Groups corresponding to their individual mandate⁶⁾see for instance Knecht, S. (2013) Arctic Regionalism in Theory and Practice: From Cooperation to Integration? in L. Heininen, Exner-Pirot, H., & Plouffe, J. (Eds.), Arctic Yearbook 2013. Akureyri: Northern Research Forum, pp. 168–172.. This points to the difficulty of drawing a clear-cut distinction between those who belong to the Arctic, call it their home or hold sovereign or territorial rights over some of its parts, and those who do not. As an analytical category to investigate the causes and consequences of Arctic change, such distinctions have been unhelpful, even though it may appear ‘tempting to focus on efforts to delineate Arctic-specific issues and, in the process, to ignore or downplay links between the Arctic and the outside world’.⁷⁾Young, O.R., & Einarsson, N. (2004) Introduction in Einarsson, N., et al. (Eds.), Arctic Human Development Report. Akureyri: Stefansson Arctic Institute, p. 20. But to give in to such temptation will, after all, blur the vision of the global determinacy and dependency of Arctic regional processes and their wider implications.

A new Arctic Paradigm

For this reason, instead of engaging in a comprehensive account of where the Arctic is (and where it is not) and who the relevant (sovereign) Arctic actors are (and who are not), we resort to a different heuristic understanding of a global Arctic as:

1. framed by different and sometimes competing imaginaries,
2. subject to and dealt with in multilevel institutional politics (local, national, regional and international),
3. articulated and influenced through the involvement of a diversified set of state and non-state actors as Arctic stakeholders
4. who together and within the existing and evolving governance frameworks address and cope with an increasingly complex number of pressing issues affecting the Arctic and beyond through various interdependencies.

With this, we attempt nothing less than introducing a new paradigm of the Arctic as a globally embedded space. Such a new heuristic approach is necessary for dealing with the pressing issues of contemporary Arctic transformations subject to highly complex global linkages and more and more addressed by multilevel politics and multistakeholderism.

At the core, the global Arctic paradigm implies mainly three developments: (1) the sources and effects of a variety of problems and challenges in the Arctic are much more diverse and complex through the still largely under-researched interdependencies between processes and systems within and outside the Arctic Circle, (2) governance of these Arctic-global linkages is decentralized and takes place in a variety of political forums from the local and subregional to the national, circumpolar and international level at which the Arctic states do not necessarily dominate political controversies, and (3) connected to this, political agency is internationalized and involves a larger set of state and non-state actors with access to those political venues or other means of exerting influence, including the ability to frame Arctic imaginaries.

This article is an excerpt from the new book “Governing Arctic Change – Global Perspectives” edited by Kathrin Keil and Sebastian Knecht. It has been published with Palgrave Macmillan and can be ordered here. The cornerstones of the global Arctic paradigm – the four I’s (imaginaries, institutional politics, involvement and issues) – are elaborated on in the four parts of the book.