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A Cacophony
Of International Initiatives |
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It would be wrong to conclude that
there is no history of international cooperation in the Circumpolar
North. In fact, three striking cases involving efforts to devise
effective governance systems to deal with well-defined issues arose
in the Arctic during the first seventy-five years of this century
[4]. In 1911, Great Britain (on behalf
of Canada), Japan, Russia, and the United States signed the
North Pacific Sealing Convention establishing a cooperative
management regime designed to restore the health of northern fur
seal stocks breeding on islands in the Bering Sea. The resultant
regime not only defused an intense international conflict but it
was also widely regarded as a successful effort in wildlife conservation
before it fell victim to preservationist preferences during the
1980s [5]. |
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During the course of the post-WW I
peace negotiations, a group of states signed the 1920 Treaty of
Spitsbergen, an agreement creating a regime for the Svalbard Archipelago
that remains in operation today. In essence, this regime awards
sovereignty over the archipelago to Norway but then proceeds to
impose a variety of restrictions designed to accommodate the interests
of the other signatories [6]. The
demilitarization provisions of this regime are often regarded as
one of the sources of similar provisions incorporated into the
Antarctic Treaty og 1959. Perhaps more surprisingly, five states,
including both the Soviet Union and the United States, joined together
in 1973 during the midst of the Cold War to sign an Agreement
on the Conservation of Polar Bears. This innovative agreement
remains in force today having survived not only dramatic political
changes but also far-reaching changes dealing with the legal regime
applicable to marine areas [7]. |
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Significant as they are, however,
these cases of international cooperation in the Arctic seem few
and far between when compared with the number and variety of new
initiatives launched over the last ten to fifteen years. The Arctic has become in recent years an extremely
active arena for the development of international initiatives falling
into a variety of categories. Some of these initiatives feature
the formation of regimes or institutions in the sense of sets of
rules of the game that give rise to social practices; others center
on the establishment of organizations in the sense of material entities
possessing offices, personnel, and budgets [8].
The fisheries regimes for the Bering and Barents Seas and the joint
development zone for the area lying between Iceland and Jan Mayen,
for instance, are all institutional arrangements or what are generally
know to students of international affairs as regimes. The Northern
Forum and the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, by contrast, are organizations
that figure as actors seeking to advance the causes of their constituents
in a variety of policy arenas. |
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Although some recent Arctic initiatives
are regionwide in scope, it is interesting to note that the Circumpolar
North has become an active zone for subregional initiatives involving
only two states in some cases but emerging as multilateral initiatives
in other instances. No doubt, the premier example of regionwide
cooperation in recent years has been the
Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) launched in
1991 and now subsumed as a component of the overarching Arctic
Council (AC) established in 1996 [9].
This largely programmatic arrangement has clearly played a role
of some significance in raising consciousness about the Arctic as
a distinct region as well as in determining the magnitude of a variety
of environmental concerns in the Arctic region [10].
Yet the emergence of other arrangements, such as the Barents
Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR) whose core members are Norway, Sweden,
Finland and the Russian Federation [11]
and the North
Atlantic Marine Mammals Commission (NAMMCO) whose principal
members are Iceland, Norway, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands [12]
makes it clear that there is considerable interest in creating multilateral
arrangements that are subregional in scope to deal with a range
of Arctic issues. |
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A particularly striking feature of
the recent surge in international initiatives in the Arctic is the
prominent role accorded to subnational units of government and nonstate
actors in many of the resultant arrangements. The ICC and the International
Arctic Science Committee (IASC) are nongovernmental organizations
that not only pursue their own agendas but that have also emerged
as significant players in various arenas featuring interstate cooperation.
The Northern
Forum is an association of states, counties, provinces, territories,
oblasts, and other entities representing the interests of subnational
units of government within a number of northern countries. Much
of the work of the BEAR is carried out by a regional council composed
of representatives of counties and oblasts in contrast to the Barents
Council in which representatives of national governments meet from
time to time. One of the most interesting developments in this realm
involves the establishment of the category of Permanent Participants
in the Arctic Council. Although the organizations belonging to this
category - currently the ICC, the
Sami Council, the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples
of the North (RAIPON), and the
Aleut International Association - are not listed as formal members
of the Arctic Council, they are accorded virtually all the rights
and privileges enjoyed by member states. |
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Beyond this, it is worth noting the
important links between efforts to promote international cooperation
in the Arctic and a number of broader, often global initiatives.
Sometimes this is a matter of nesting Arctic provisions into overarching
agreements as in the case of Article 234 of the 1982 United
Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) which deals
explicitly with the management of ice-covered areas [13].
In other cases, it is a matter of finding ways to bring global regimes
(e.g. the biodiversity regime) to bear on specific issues arising
in the high northern latitudes. Perhaps even more important are
those cases in which actions taken in other parts of the world are
producing particularly severe impacts in the high latitudes. Cases
in point include the effects of climate change on Arctic systems,
the thinning of stratospheric ozone over the poles, and especially
the migration of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) to high northern
latitudes along with the subsequent bioaccumulation and biomagnification
of these contaminants at higher levels of the food chain. Increasingly,
therefore, the links between global processes and Arctic systems
demand attention in efforts to come to grips with environmental
problems in international society. |
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