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We can begin to answer this question by understanding Arctic governance as a “regime,” which Stephen D. Krasner defines as a set of explicit or implicit “principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations.”¹⁸ The Arctic regime consists of a web of numerous formal and informal institutions and mechanisms, many of them innovative, each with differing levels of membership, participation, and rules of engagement, through which state and non-state actors seek to work together and to manage areas of friction.

The issues facing this vast region are complex: no single institutional framework would be able to accommodate the diverse interests of Arctic and non-Arctic stakeholders and the many challenges they face. That is why the Arctic regime is not a single comprehensive and integrated structure covering the whole gamut of the region’s policy agenda. It has evolved organically into a mosaic of specific hard and soft law measures and often cross-cutting formal and informal arrangements at local, state, sub-regional and regional levels.¹⁹

Over the past quarter century, the Arctic Council has emerged as the hub of the networks that together comprise the Arctic regime. Its founding document is not a treaty but the Ottawa Declaration of September 19, 1996. The Arctic Council’s membership consists of the eight Arctic states (Canada, Greenland/Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States). All decisions of the Arctic Council and its subsidiary bodies are by consensus of the eight Arctic states. The Council has a two-year chairmanship that rotates among the eight member states. A standing Arctic Council Secretariat was established in Tromsø, Norway, in 2013. Thematic areas of work addressed by the Council include environment and climate, biodiversity, oceans, Arctic peoples, agreements on joint scientific research as well as on collaborative efforts to counter marine oil pollution and facilitate search and rescue missions in the air and at sea. The Ottawa Declaration states explicitly that the Arctic Council “should not deal with matters related to military security.”²⁰

In addition to the eight member states, six organizations representing Arctic Indigenous peoples have status as Permanent Participants. This has been an innovative and largely unprecedented arrangement; Permanent Participants must be fully consulted by Arctic Council member states before decisions are taken. These innovations have helped to make the Council an important mechanism for increasing the prominence of the concerns of the Arctic’s Indigenous peoples.²¹

The Arctic Council and its rotating presidencies offer avenues for Arctic actors to devise practical cooperation on an array of specific issues, and either to work out common principles, general norms, specific rules and agreed procedures, or to understand better their differences.²² It has helped to build continuity and confidence in efforts to address circumpolar issues. The Council, through its task forces, has served as forum and catalyst for a number of legally-binding circumpolar agreements, such as the Agreement on Cooperation on Aeronautical and Maritime Search and Rescue in the Arctic, and an agreement on enhancing international scientific cooperation in the region.²³ They have also spun off a number of independent specialized satellite bodies that are intended to complement the Council’s work. These include the Arctic Coast Guard Forum, the Arctic Economic Council, the Arctic Offshore Regulators Forum.²⁴

Moreover, the Arctic Council’s work has resulted in what Piotr Graczyk and Timo Koivurova have called “probably the most significant accomplishment in Arctic environmental cooperation: a substantial expansion of our knowledge about the Arctic environment, including natural and anthropogenic processes.”²⁵ It has also enabled the identification of major risks to the inhabitants of the region and the forms of responses for addressing those risks. The Council has provided critical input into negotiations and the implementation of international conventions, such as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and the Minamata Convention on Mercury.²⁶

Another key element of the Arctic governance regime is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which sets forth a comprehensive regime of law and order in the world’s oceans, including the Arctic Ocean. The UNCLOS, which came into force in 1994, regulates the 200-nautical-mile national economic zones offshore within which a nation has exclusive rights to fish the waters and tap the minerals under the sea bed. Beyond this limit, states with Arctic coastlines are not permitted to fish or drill. Yet a nation can lobby for a zone of up to 350 nautical miles from the shore, or even more—if it can prove the existence of an underwater formation that is an extension of its dry land mass. Such claims are decided by the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, established under the UNCLOS.²⁷

The five Arctic littoral states (Canada, Denmark/Greenland, Norway, Russia and the United States) reaffirmed in the 2008 Ilulissat Declaration that the Arctic would be governed by the UNCLOS, thereby effectively ringfencing for themselves the strongest rights over the region on issues such as delineation of the outer limits of the continental shelf, the prevention of marine environment (including currently ice-covered areas), freedom of navigation, marine scientific research and other issues of the seas. Nevertheless, even then there were deviating readings of international law among the Arctic Five, pertaining to shelf claims and to ownership of waterways. These are issues we address later.

The Arctic Council has also become a central node for a larger solar system of orbiting bodies involving non-Arctic actors. As the Arctic has risen on the global agenda, more countries have sought to assert their stake in Arctic issues, with some even looking for entry to the Council. The United Kingdom, for instance, has designated itself “the Arctic’s nearest neighbour,” though it is not clear if there is substance behind the rhetoric. Not to be outdone, China calls itself a “near-Arctic” nation, even though its northernmost point is about 900 miles south of the Arctic Circle. In response, the eight founding states have over the past two decades conceded observer status to 13 non-Arctic states, 14 intergovernmental and interparliamentary organizations, and 12 non-governmental organizations, making for a total of 39 observer states and organizations today.²⁸

This intermeshing of interests among Arctic and non-Arctic actors has demonstrated some successes. For instance, in 2017, the five nations with Arctic coastlines—Canada, Greenland (Denmark), Norway, Russia and the United States, together with China, Japan, South Korea, Iceland and the European Union (EU), agreed to ban for 16 years unregulated fishing in newly ice-free international waters of the high Arctic—an area equivalent in size to the Mediterranean—or until scientists are able to analyze the ecology of the quickly-thawing ocean and put into place a plan for sustainable fishing. This deal still has to be signed and ratified, which is no easy task. But as Malgorzata Smieszek notes, the negotiations are a major step in conservation efforts and another example of what diplomats call “Arctic exceptionalism,” meaning a willingness by big and small powers alike to set aside some of their geopolitical differences for the sake of common interests.²⁹

The Arctic regime is underpinned by additional interactive mechanisms that promote transparency of intention and action, facilitate cooperative connections, and anticipate, prevent and manage differences. These mechanisms include but go beyond formal state-centric institutions. They comprise, for instance, interactions through the University of the Arctic (a cooperative network, consisting of higher education institutions and other organizations based in the circumpolar region) and the track-two-diplomacy offered by the Arctic Circle Assembly. They include connections and exchange of good practice with other sub-regional organizations such as the Barents Euro-Arctic Council and the Council of Baltic Sea States.³⁰

A regime’s effectiveness, of course, depends both on the degree to which its welter of institutions and networks, organizations, governments, and international bodies can act as a “catalyst for cooperation” leading to shared principles, procedures, rules, and norms, and how well it can give life to those commitments, as participant actors engage together and with others.³¹ In this regard, the Arctic regime can register some notable successes, even as it continues to grapple with continuing issues of contention, gaps in capacities, and asymmetries of power and interdependence. While achievements do not always match aspirations, the Arctic region is arguably better off because the ever-evolving regime has given greater voice to the concerns of Arctic Indigenous peoples, produced influential scientific assessments, provided a platform for negotiations on the first legally-binding circumpolar agreements, and promoted peace in a region that had served as one of the main theatres of the Cold War.³² The Arctic regime, as it has crystallized in the post-Cold War era, has demonstrated that non-treaty-based mechanisms and frameworks can sometimes offer more innovative means of governance than formalized, state-centric arrangements. Such flexible, informal modes of collaboration may prove even more useful in addressing governance challenges in the face of the kinds of rapid, complex and potentially disruptive challenges that both Arctic and non-Arctic states and societies may be facing in the future.³³