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of Arctic affairs by reducing the attractions of Arctic shipping routes and calling into question visions of largescale infrastructure projects in the Arctic. Even more dramatic are the current and prospective impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, which knowledgeable observers are now treating as the most disruptive global event since the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II. Quite apart from the dangers associated with the pandemic in terms of public health in the Arctic, there is growing evidence to suggest that the crisis will lead to profound changes in the global economic system. The Arctic’s natural resources, always expensive to produce and deliver, may seem significantly less competitive in the global markets of the future than they have been in recent years.
Still, this does not mean that there are not and will not continue to be a range of policy issues that are Arctic-specific and that can and should be addressed by the Arctic states either individually or in cooperation with one another. The impacts of climate change on Arctic communities in the form of coastal erosion and melting permafrost, for example, are generating urgent needs for adaptation that cannot be relegated to the domain of challenges to be addressed at some future time. The need to respond vigorously to issues of public health affecting the Arctic’s human residents, including the extraordinary incidence of substance abuse and suicide in some communities, is undeniable. Rapid increases in the incidence of massive fires and extreme flooding in the far North are posing enormous challenges not only to social systems but also to ecosystems. The consequences of habitat loss or disruption for Arctic species, such as polar bears, walrus and caribou, are worrisome, to put it mildly. In short, there is no shortage of pressing concerns that will require responses first and foremost on the part of the Arctic states and their Arctic communities.
Some of these issues lend themselves to action on the part of individual states or even individual communities. Relocating a community overwhelmed by coastal erosion, for instance, is to a large extent a local affair, despite the thorny problem of finding ways to finance such moves. But other issues will call for concerted responses, and there is considerable room for sharing experience and expertise even in those cases where individual responses are required. To take a prominent example, while the details of concerns relating to public health differ from country to country and sometimes even from community to community within the same country, there is much to be said for pooling knowledge and sharing evidence regarding the effectiveness of specific response strategies even in such cases. The implications of these observations for the appeal of the Arctic zone of peace narrative and for the continuing need for cooperative mechanisms like the Arctic Council are worthy of consideration.
The Council is not in a position to take actions to control the drivers of climate change, to make authoritative decisions about the trajectory of large-scale natural resource extraction in the Arctic, or to exercise significant influence on the trajectory of great-power politics in the Arctic. Any effort to do so would risk a debilitating demonstration of weakness and a loss of credibility regarding the capacity of the council to operate effectively in other areas. Nevertheless, the Arctic Council, with its Working Groups taking responsibility for major initiatives, may well be the right body to address the sorts of issues identified in the preceding paragraph. This suggests that it is time for a reset regarding Arctic governance, directing the efforts of the Arctic Council toward issues that it is in a position to tackle effectively and turning to other bodies to address issues in which coming to terms with the linkages between the Arctic and the global system constitutes a critical feature of any effort to make progress.32
This may seem disappointing to some, especially to believers in the idea that the Arctic can be set aside as a zone of peace and that mechanisms like the Arctic Council may even be able to play a role in fostering cooperative activities designed to defuse conflicts occurring in other regions. But the best advice at this juncture may be to think about disaggregating the Arctic agenda, steering individual issues toward those policy arenas most likely to have the capacity to address them effectively. The alternative is to risk an outcome in which the very real achievements of the last 30 years dissolve into a free-for-all in which there is little hope of arriving at constructive results regarding any Arctic issues. Interestingly, developments along these lines may lead to a situation featuring the deployment of distinctive policy narratives in different settings, with the Arctic zone of peace narrative providing a framework for efforts to address a range of Arctic-specific issues in settings like the Arctic Council and one or more of the other narratives offering ways to organize thinking about links between the Arctic and the overarching global order.
Notes
1 1. The following account draws on my own experience as a close observer of and, in some cases, an active participant in Arctic affairs starting in the 1970s. During the 1980s, I developed the concept of “the age of the Arctic” and became active in a group promoting the idea of the Arctic as a distinctive region with a policy agenda of its own. As a participant, I have served as co-chair of the Working Group on Arctic International Relations, vice-president of the International Arctic Science Committee, chair of the Board of Governors of the University of the Arctic, co-chair of the Report Steering Committee of the Arctic Human Development Report, and chair of the Steering Committee of the Arctic Governance Project. A more thorough treatment of the topics I cover in this chapter might make use of content analysis of official documents, interviews with participants, a review of the secondary literature, and other related methods.
2 2. Mikhail Gorbachev, “Speech in Murmansk on the Occasion of the Presentation of the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star to the City of Murmansk, 1 October 1987,” https://www.barentsinfo.fi/docs/gorbachev_speech.pdf.
3 3. Oran R. Young, “Is It Time for a Reset in Arctic Governance?” Sustainability 11 (2019), 4497, doi:10.3390/su11164497.
4 4. Ibid.
5 5. Ilulissat Declaration, “Declaration of the Arctic Ocean Governance Conference adopted on May 28, 2008, https://cil.nus.sg/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/2008-Ilulissat-Declaration.pdf.
6 6. Oran R. Young, “Constructing the ‘New’ Arctic: The Future of the Circumpolar North in a Changing Global Order,” Outlines of Global Transformation 12 (2019), pp. 6–24.
7 7. John English, Ice and Water: Politics, Peoples, and the Arctic Council (Toronto: Allen Lane, 2013).
8 8. Oran R. Young, Creating Regimes: Arctic Accords and International Governance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
9 9. Rovaniemi Declaration, “Declaration on the Protection of the Arctic Environment adopted on 14 June 1991,” https://arcticcircle.uconn.edu.NatResources/Policy/rovaniemi.html.
10 10. David P. Stone, The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
11 11. Ottawa Declaration, “Declaration on the Establishment of the Arctic Council adopted on 19 September 1996,” http://hdi/handle.net/11374/85/.
12 12. Douglas Nord, The Arctic Council: Governance within the Far North (London: Routledge, 2016); Malgorzata Smieszek, “Informal International Regimes: A Case Study of the Arctic Council,” PhD Dissertation, University of Lapland, 2019.
13 13. Alun Anderson, After the Ice: Life, Death, and Geopolitics in the New Arctic (New York: Smithsonian Books, 2009).
14 14. Robert W. Corell et al., eds, The Arctic in World Affairs: A North Pacific Dialogue on Global-Arctic Interactions (Busan and Honolulu: KMI and EWC, 2019).
15 15. AMAP, “Arctic Climate Change Update 2019,” (Tromsø, Norway: Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme of the Arctic Council, 2019); NOAA, NOAA Arctic Report Card 2019, https://arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card/Report-Card-2019/ArtMID/7916/ArticleID/837/About-Arctic-Report-Card-2019.
16 16. Mark C. Serreze, Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).
17 17. Robert W. Corell, “The Arctic: Tomorrow’s Changes … Today!” paper to be published in Paul Wassmann, ed., Whither the Arctic Ocean (forthcoming).
18 18. Tatiana Mitrova, “Arctic Resource Development: Economics and Politics,” in Corell et al., op. cit., pp. 205–24.
19 19.