Prof. Dr. em. Franklyn Griffiths
University of Toronto; Consultant on Canadian and circumpolar Arctic Affairs (Canada)

This presentation aims to open a discussion of the main challenges presented by resource development and marine transportation in an increasingly accessible Arctic region. It argues that structural and political challenges present the greatest need for policy responses. At issue here are limitations on the present capacity of the eight Arctic states to engage in effective international cooperation. These limitations stem from the prevalence of sub-regional perspectives and priorities among the Eight, from the fact that Arctic problems and solutions alike owe much to activity occurring outside the region, and from a proper conviction that collective action in the Arctic must be consensual. Responses aimed at capacity-building for cooperative stewardship—for locally informed regional governance arrangements that not only police but show respect and care for the natural environment and living things in it—will necessarily be varied. They will make use of existing global and regional institutions and instruments such as UNCLOS, the IMO, OSPAR, and the Arctic Council. They will also create new regimes as new needs are recognized. Some of these will require participation by non-Arctic states, for example Arctic resource users interested in safe and efficient marine transportation. Others may involve the Arctic states only, for example in targetted support for reduction in land-based sources of marine pollution. Still others will feature subsets of the Eight, as in harmonized traffic management in the Arctic waters of North America. All of this will require new means of coordination and support if synergies among varied management processes are to be identified and exploited most effectively. In our view, these new means of coordination should be provided by an invigorated Arctic Council. The best way to strengthen the Council is to enlarge it now with the inclusion of non-Arctic states and intergovernmental entities as consultative parties with unrestricted rights to speak to the issues.

Canada, we propose, should seek the assent of the Eight to an arrangement in which interested non-Arctic actors are enabled to contribute to the collective capacity for stewardship in managing interdependencies between the Arctic region and its global surround. The consensus of the Council would continue to be stated by the Eight who would, however, need to demonstrate readiness to hear and as necessary take account of the views of outside others actually or potentially affected by international collaboration and the lack of it. Stewardship as we understand it insists on the primacy of the local in Arctic governance. The eight states have behaved accordingly in undertaking to hear freely from the region’s indigenous peoples as permanent participants in the Council. By the same token, non-Arctic states should be able to yield to the Eight as those most immediately and directly affected by globally informed collective action. Consultative parties should also be required to make annual contributions, matched by the Eight, to an Arctic Fund. The Fund would give the Council new ability to support stewardship projects, be they in the pre-positioning of oil-spill response capabilities, in the regional sharing of national satellite monitoring assets, or in the encouragement of Arctic stewardship activity on the part of the Russian Federation.