Contemporary Arctic transformations and their global causes and consequences have put international cooperation in the Arctic Council, the region's most important forum for addressing Arctic affairs, at the forefront of research in Northern governance. With interest in Arctic regional affairs in world politics being at a historical high, the actual participation and contribution by interested actors to regional governance arrangements, such as the Arctic Council, has remained very much a blind spot. This article introduces and analyses a novel dataset on stakeholder participation in the Arctic Council (STAPAC) for all member states, Permanent Participants and observers in Ministerial, Senior Arctic Officials' and subsidiary body meetings between 1998 and 2015. The article finds that participation in the Arctic Council varies significantly across meeting levels and type of actors, and that new admissions to the Council, a source of major contestation in recent debates, do not necessarily result in more actors attending. The article further discusses these findings in light of three prevalent debates in Arctic governance research, and shows the empirical relevance of the STAPAC dataset for the study of Arctic cooperation and conflict, observer involvement in the Arctic Council system and political representation of indigenous Permanent Participants.
With the Arctic ice barrier melting away due to anthropogenic global warming, Arctic states' governmental policies will inevitably determine future governance prospects in high northern latitudes. Whether multilateral cooperation will prevail over or at least complement national economic and security ambitions in the vulnerable Arctic ecosystem, is an often spotlighted but principally hypothetical question that lacks empirical depth. To shed light on this issue, we argue that foreign policy strategies on both sides of the Arctic Ocean are underpinned by a distinct "spatial logic" that drives state behaviour in a fuzzy definition of Arctic territory and accounts for recent region-building dynamics. Assessing geopolitical perceptions of the USA, Canada and the Russian Federation unveils the dichotomous nature of Arctic strategies swaying back and forth between "internal" and "common" waters. From this perspective, it is more Canada's domestically motivated demand for absolute sovereignty that hampers pan-Arctic collaboration rather than Russia's hegemon-like status as an Arctic actor.
This note studies the addendum to the Arctic Council (AC)'s 2013 Observer Manual adopted at the Senior Arctic Officials’ (SAO) meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, in October 2015. The amendment means another essential step to systematise further and improve the council's working relations with currently 32 entities that hold observer status in the forum. Compared to the initial manual that sketched out the role observers should play in the council's subsidiary bodies, the latest revisions delineate a framework for enhancing observer participation and commitment in working group, task force and expert group meetings. After reviewing the content and practical implications of the addendum in the context of larger reform efforts to adapt the council to the age of a global(ising) Arctic, the article further discusses a number of signals the Anchorage decision sends to observers. These comprise the council's willingness and ability to quick, unified and purposeful action towards institutional adaptation and procedural reform as considered necessary to address organisational deficiencies, strengthened top-down steering of the reform processes by SAOs as related to the work conducted in subsidiary bodies and the overall functioning of the council, and higher expectations on observers to contribute to the AC system and deliver on the new provisions.
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