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Part 1
Governance and Cooperation
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Chapter 1
Adaptive Governance for a Changing Arctic
Oran R. Young
The Arctic is a dynamic region. Conditions prevailing in the region today differ from those of yesterday in ways that have far-reaching consequences regarding needs for governance and the means of addressing them. There is every reason to expect that the Arctic of tomorrow will present a new array of needs for governance. It follows that effective governance in this region requires arrangements that are resilient in the sense that they are able to adapt to changing demands for governance over time without compromising their ability to solve problems in the present.1 Taking this observation as a point of departure, I consider current and future needs for governance in the Arctic and assess the capacity of existing and emerging arrangements to meet these needs effectively. In the concluding section, I comment on the implications of these developments for the framing of policies relating to the Arctic on the part of China and other non-Arctic states.
The changing Arctic
With the waning of the Cold War during the 1980s and the final collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the Arctic moved to the periphery of international society in geopolitical and geoeconomic terms. Whereas the Arctic had been a critical theater of operations during the Cold War for the deployment of nucleararmed submarines and manned bombers equipped with long-range cruise missiles, military activity in the region became a sideshow in the post-Cold War strategic environment. Submarines still operated in the Arctic Basin with some frequency, but no one paid much attention to the region in thinking about cutting-edge concerns in the realm of international security. The Arctic remained a source of world-class deposits of oil and gas. At its height, the Prudhoe Bay field on Alaskaās North Slope alone produced about two million barrels of oil a day to be shipped to southern markets via the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. But the 1990s also emerged as a period of low world market prices for oil. During the middle of the decade, for example, the benchmark price for oil dipped below USD 20 a barrel in 2011 dollars. The role of Arctic hydrocarbons in international trade was limited. Just as the region moved to the periphery in strategic terms, therefore, the Arctic seemed less attractive in global economic terms than it had seemed in the preceding decades.
From the perspective of international cooperation, these conditions were conducive to innovation. Few cared about the implications of Arctic developments in global terms. Those whose concerns were regional in scope, on the other hand found that resistance to innovative initiatives in national capitals was not a serious barrier to progress. The result was a series of new initiatives starting with the establishment of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) in 1990 and proceeding with the launching of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy in 1991, the founding of the Northern Forum in 1991/1993, the creation of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR) in 1993, and finally the founding of the Arctic Council in 1996. Taken together, this burst of cooperative initiatives constituted a remarkable development; it put the Arctic on a cooperative path that has played out with impressive results during the subsequent years. Many came to regard the region as a prominent example of success in the effort to promote peace and pursue sustainable development at the regional level.
Changes occurring in recent years have altered the status of the Arctic in important respects.2 The impacts of climate change are being felt sooner and more dramatically in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet. Not only is this significant in its own right; it is also opening the Arctic to development on the part of those interested in commercial shipping, the extraction of natural resources including minerals as well as hydrocarbons, and newly emerging opportunities for adventure tourism. As a result the links between the Arctic as a more or less distinct region and the global system are becoming tighter. There is no reason to expect at this stage that the Arctic is on its way toward becoming a zone of conflict. Nonetheless, it is easy to understand the growth of interest in Arctic developments on the part of important non-Arctic actors such as the European Union and major Asian states including China.
The links between the Arctic and the global system are environmental, economic, and political in nature. The impacts of climate change on the Arctic extend well beyond the melting of sea ice to include ocean acidification, the growing intensity of coastal storm surges, the melting of permafrost, and the destabilization of the Greenland ice sheet. Environmental links also include fluxes of contaminants such as persistent organic pollutants (POPs), heavy metals like mercury, and black carbon that originate beyond the confines of the Arctic, but make their way to the region via airborne and waterborne vectors. The growth of interest in commercial shipping in the Arctic and the extraction of the regionās natural resources are conditioned by global market forces that determine the attractiveness of newly accessible Arctic shipping routes and supplies of oil and gas. While conflicts relating to the Arctic itself are of limited importance and generally subject to mutually agreeable methods of resolution, the region is increasingly sensitive to global geopolitical forces, such as the rise of EastāWest tensions in areas like the Ukraine and the increasing influence of a resurgent China. A common denominator regarding all the regionalāglobal links is the increasing importance of external drivers as determinants of what happens at the regional level. It follows that Arctic governance arrangements must find effective means to address the impacts of these external drivers rather than treating the Arctic as a self-contained region that can be governed without reference to the effects of broader environmental, economic, and political forces. This means, among other things that non-Arctic actors must couple expression of interest in Arctic opportunities with an acknowledgement of their shared responsibility for the fate of the Arctic.
Under the circumstances, it is important to draw a distinction between those needs for governance that can be addressed effectively through regional mechanisms like the Arctic Council and those needs that will require attention on the part of mechanisms that are able to engage with extra-regional forces. A few examples will clarify the importance of this observation. While the factors that will determine the attractiveness of Arctic shipping routes are global in nature, the need for enhanced search and rescue (SAR) capacity in the Arctic is a matter that the Arctic Council is well-suited to address. The 2011 Agreement on Cooperation on Aeronautical and Maritime Search and Rescue in the Arctic negotiated under the auspices of the council makes good sense.3 While world market forces will determine the prospects for large scale oil and gas development in the Arctic, the issues associated with oil spill preparedness and response in the maritime Arctic are suitable for treatment at the regional level. The Agreement on Cooperation on Marine Oil Pollution Preparedness and Response in the Arctic signed at the Arctic Councilās Ministerial Meeting in Kiruna, Sweden in May 2013 therefore makes sense.4 While economic and political forces that are global in scope will determine the impacts of climate change in the Arctic, issues of adaptation to the impacts of such changes are matters of regional concern. The Arctic Councilās ongoing project on Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic (AACA) is thus an appropriate initiative at this stage.5 It is essential to differentiate among needs for governance in terms of their suitability for regional treatment, allocating those that are suitable to mechanisms like the Arctic Council and recognizing the need to turn to broader mechanisms in cases where regional solutions are not feasible.
An Arctic governance mosaic
The central elements of the Arctic governance system are products of agreements reached during the 1990s. They have served the region well for almost 20 years. The Arctic Council, for example, has proven more effective in dealing with an array of regional issues than most of those present at the creation in 1996 were able to foresee.6 Despite its obvious limits as an intergovernmental organization, the council has had considerable success in identifying emerging issues, framing them for consideration in policy arenas, and moving them into prominent spots on the policy agenda. Nevertheless, as we move toward the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Arctic Council, it is increasingly apparent that the existing arrangements are not adequate to address the full range of needs for governance relating to the Arctic arising today and likely to come into focus during the coming years. The question of how to adapt the existing arrangements to meet emerging needs for governance is increasingly prominent.
Some governmental and non-governmental bodies, such as the European Union and the World Wildlife Fund, often referring to experience with the Antarctic Treaty System, have proposed the establishment of a comprehensive and legally-binding treaty for the Arctic. However, this is not a realistic option for the Arctic during the foreseeable future.7 The analogy between the two polar regions is not helpful in this connection. Unlike the Antarctic, the Arctic has some four million permanent residents, has long been militarized, and is the site of world-class industrial operations.8 What is more, the five Arctic coastal states have made it clear that they do not support such an initiative. While it is possible that the views of these states will change in the future, this is not a likely occurrence over the next 5 to 10 years.
There are other reasons as well why an effort to devise a comprehensive Arctic Treaty is not a desirable step at this juncture. There is a standard tradeoff between the legally binding nature of an agreement and the willingness of states to become members, the content of an agreementās substantive provisions, and the time it takes both to negotiate the terms of the agreement and to execute the formalities required for the agreement to enter into force. An Arctic Treaty with significant content would be difficult to negotiate and would almost certainly take considerable time to enter into force; there is a real prospect that one or more of the coastal states would fail to ratify the treaty. Equally important in terms of the focus of this article, legally binding agreements are seldom highly adaptable. Although they may include provisions allowing for the introduction of amendments, these provisions are typically cumbersome and politically sensitive. These difficulties are clearly exemplified by the experience of the Antarctic Treaty System.
If a comprehensive treaty is not the solution for Arctic governance, what is the alternative? What makes sense at this stage is the continued development of a mosaic of governance arrangements. The hallmark of this mosaic is the existence of a number of distinct elements that all deal in one way or another with the same spatially-defined region but that are non-hierarchical in the sense that they are not subordinate to one another and that there is no overarching arrangement under which they all operate.9 In the case of the Arctic, it is helpful to identify six types of elements of the emerging institutional mosaic: (i) global agreements or regimes developed by global organizations that are pertinent to the Arctic, (ii) the Arctic Council (iii) place-based management mechanisms, (iv) publicāprivate partnerships, (v) informal venues for addressing Arctic matters of common concern, and (vi) all-hands gatherings.
The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) provides a constitutive framework applying to human activities in the maritime Arctic just as it applies to other areas.10 The convention also contains a separate article on ice-covered waters (Article 234), which allows the Arctic coastal states to introduce special measures regarding the protection of marine systems. The general provisions of Article 76 on the delimitation of jurisdictional boundaries on the outer continental shelf have become especially important with the increasing accessibility of Arctic waters. A number of the International Maritime Organizationās (IMO) conventions, such as the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) and the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) are applicable to the Arctic. The current effort to negotiate a legally-binding Polar Code dealing with the design, construction, and operation of commercial ships in Arctic waters is taking place within the framework of the IMO and is o...
