Governance of the Arctic

• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press 2022
• Subjects: Arctic; Canada; Greenland; Norway; Arctic Council; Iceland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199743292-0311

The Arctic, as a political region, includes the eight countries of Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark (Greenland), Canada, Russia, and the United States, and geographically as north of 66°, or where the average temperature is lower than 10 degrees Celsius. The study of how international rules, political practices, and institutional mechanisms facilitate the capacity of Arctic states to manage governance of the Arctic region is a relatively new genre of literature. For decades, scholarly attention of the Arctic region focused on issues of militarization and security of the region. This changed with the end of the Cold War and the turn by the eight Arctic states to emphasize cooperation through collaboration and institutional participation in new Arctic fora. As such, governance of the Arctic covers a thirty-year period of literature discussing the developing governance of this emerging region, focusing on the development emerging in the post–Cold War environment. Even within this relatively short time frame, a number of trends have emerged in the discourse of Arctic governance from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including law, political sciences, and geography, including issues around environmental and oceans governance, legal frameworks, Indigenous governance, and perspectives from International Relations. The focus of the conversation frequently centers on the development and role of the Arctic Council, but also includes environmental resource governance and the role of Indigenous people in the development of this governance. Other key approaches include normative evaluations of this regional governance and the interactions between Arctic and non-Arctic states. Discourse on Arctic governance has become a particular focus of interest, especially since the early 1990s. Beyond the structure of the Arctic Council, governance of the region is distributed in a number of regional institutions, such as the Barents Euro-Arctic Council and the West Nordic Council.