Article 4: Steady as She Goes? Structure, Change Agents

In the final article, I turned my attention to the institutional change that the AC has experienced since its formation in 1996. As before, I sought to inform our understanding of the AC with the findings from the general literature on international environmental regimes, also complemented in this case with insights flowing from broader studies of gradual institutional change (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010).

The fact that the AC since its establishment has evolved significantly in reach and stature has not escaped the attention of scholars and practitioners. Most of the accounts dedicated to the council’s evolution have focused, however, on developments that have taken place in the council between 2007 and 2009, and on the exogenous sources of the AC’s change. In order to complement that outlook and deepen our comprehension of the AC, I sought in the article to answer two primary questions: first, what are the changes that have taken place in the AC since its inception? Second, how can we explain those changes? It is important to note that in the latter inquiry, I concentrated specifically on the council’s endogenous properties that enable or constrain its change and that thus far, in my assessment, have received little treatment in studies of the AC. Cognizant of the fact that complex causality is the salient feature in virtually every case of institutional change, and that institutional change always arises from combinations of various interactive drivers, the aim of this article did not go as far as to offer a provision of a full explication of the AC’s change. Instead, I considered the presented research an important step in a process aimed at understanding the council’s evolution, filling a significant gap in the existing scholarship on the council and paving the way for future studies to investigate the abovementioned interactions of both endogenous and exogenous drivers.

With respect to changes that have taken place in the council, there has been a multitude of them. Among others, the study showed that, contrary to commonly held perceptions, it took nearly a decade to operationalize the provisions of the

Ottawa Declaration and that the structure of the council as presently known—with six permanent participants and six working groups—was not fully established until 2006. Moreover, the council’s administrative capacities have been much enhanced thanks to the establishment in 2013 of the Arctic Council Secretariat, which today also serves as the secretariat of the ACAP and EPPR working groups and is located in Tromsø, Norway, along with most of the secretariats of the working groups and the Indigenous Peoples’ Secretariat, which are no longer dispersed among Arctic states and are instead centralised in a single location. With respect to its subsidiary bodies, the AC currently maintains—in addition to its six regular working groups—from two to five task forces and expert groups at any moment, one of the most significant of the structural changes to the council. Finally, it has 39 observers, in contrast to the original nine in 1998, and a unifying set of strategies and guiding documents that clarify the responsibilities of various actors within the AC and steer their relations with the outside world. In addition to changes in the council’s structure, I also found numerous less formal, yet no less consequential, changes in terms of social practices within the AC. These include, among others, a shift towards issues related to economic development, the introduction of executive meetings of SAOs, attendance of the council’s meetings by higher-ranked officials and diplomats, and the elimination of direct recommendations from the SAO reports to ministers, which arguably leaves more space for direct negotiations of AC ministerial declarations by foreign ministry representatives. More specific policy recommendations have also begun to be included in the council’s various assessment reports, and there have also been more extensive follow-up activities carried out with respect to some of these recommendations, even if the overall record of the implementation of AC guidelines has not been especially favourable. Finally, the AC has expanded the capacity-enhancement side of its work, most notably in areas covered by ACAP as well as by the first two legally-binding treaties negotiated under the auspices of the council—search and rescue and oil-spill preparedness. In sum, all of these developments taken jointly represent an AC that is viewed today as the centrepiece of Arctic governance, whose portfolio has significantly expanded, whose structure has grown, and whose procedures have been decisively streamlined, providing much stronger top-down steering from the SAOs and thus, respectively, Arctic states’ ministries of foreign affairs. It is a much more coherent and high-profile body than before, with a much higher level of interest and dedication paid to it by its members and observers alike.

When it comes to the second question on explaining these changes, the analysis presented in the article revealed that the AC’s constitutive features—a lack of legal foundation, decision-making based on consensus, an open to multiple interpretations’

mandate as well as a strictly defined and limited membership—create a very malleable setting susceptible to the influence, both positive and negative, of agents seeking to instigate gradual change and ultimately steer the trajectory of developments

within the council. As such, the analysis drew our attention to previously understudied questions of agency and endogenous sources in the processes of institutional change of the AC.

Finally, and importantly from the perspective of my overall in-depth case study of the AC, the examination presented in the article and an effort to analyze and classify changes observed in the AC revealed that the application of distinctions from the general literature on international environmental regimes to the council is far from straightforward, and that the council oftentimes does not precisely fit the proposed categories. Whereas this observation is not in itself particularly revelatory, seeing that the terminology we find in the literature has been designed primarily with cases of hard law and treaty-based institutions in mind, it showed the potential that a study of the council—a soft-law arrangement based on a political declaration—might offer in terms of expanding our understanding of international environmental institutions and changes within them. As a result, the conclusions from the article served as an important building block in my further elaboration of the concept of informal international regimes—the culmination of my inquiry into the AC presented in this thesis.

Before moving there, the following chapter provides an overview of discussions related to soft law and its role in international cooperation.

6. SOFT LAW AND INTERNATIONAL