The Arctic Council as a Success Case for Transnational Cooperation in Times of Rapid Global Changes?
Dorothea Wehrmann
In times of rapid global changes, agreements such as the Paris Climate Agreement illustrate the growing need for transnational cooperation to solve complex and interrelated challenges that affect humanity at large. In past decades, a number of forums and institutions formed to enhance cooperation and coordinate different approaches and policies transnationally. Not all of them have been assessed to be a success. The Arctic Council is a forum that is widely perceived as facilitating transnational cooperation – also in times of rapid global changes. This article explores systematically in how far the Arctic Council can be considered an example to learn from and identifies useful “ingredients” for strengthening transnational cooperation more generally. First, by drawing on global governance research this study shows that in the literature, very different perspectives consider similar factors as strengthening transnational cooperation. Second, it outlines how the AC has adhered to various factors identified in the literature but also recognises the need to improve its process management. The concluding section argues that particularly the Arctic Council’s focus on knowledge generation and expertise has encouraged the maintenance of robust transnational cooperation.1
Introduction When discussing how transnational cooperation2 can successfully contribute to the governance of far-reaching, entangled, and complex challenges such as the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the Paris Climate Agreement, particularly in development studies “a look up north” to the Arctic region is often missing. This is surprising, given the Arctic’s experience with transboundary challenges and its unique exposure to rapid global changes. Moreover, since its origin in 1996 cooperation of non-state and state actors is at the core of “the leading intergovernmental forum promoting cooperation, coordination and interaction among Arctic States, Arctic Indigenous communities and other Arctic inhabitants” (Arctic Council, 2018, emphasis added), and the Arctic Council (AC) has Dorothea Wehrmann is a researcher at the German Development Institute – Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE).