Christoph Humrich

Fragmented International Governance of Arctic Offshore Oil: Governance Challenges and Institutional Improvement

The governance architecture in the Arctic region is subject to broad public and academic debate. Existing governance arrangements are not considered sufficient to minimize risks and impacts from Arctic offshore oil activities. These governance arrangements are fragmented between law of the sea norms, numerous regulatory conventions, and non-legally binding guidelines produced by the Arctic Council, an informal body of the eight Arctic states. While the benign form of cooperative fragmentation seems to prevail, specific governance challenges exist. The nature of these governance challenges and political feasibility considerations suggest an enabling joint management approach for the architecture of Arctic governance.

Sicherheitspolitik im Arktischen Rat? Lieber nicht!

Ongoing political, legal, environmental and economic changes open up the Arctic. This has implications for regional security. The article tackles the question whether the preeminent regional institution, the Arctic Council, should include security-related topics in its portfolio to deal with the emerging challenges. The article argues that the regional security issues will be taken care of better in other institutions for at least two reasons: dealing with security-related topics might negatively impact the Arctic Council’s institutional practice, while at the same time the Arctic Council might not provide the best institutional background needed to cope with the most pertinent issues on the security agenda.

Souveränitätsdenken und Seerecht. Regionalisierung von Meerespolitik in der Arktis als neue Staatsräson

Uber die Verhandlungen der von 1973 bis 1982 tagenden dritten Seerechtskonferenz der Vereinten Nationen (VN) wurde festgestellt, dass sich in ihr „[w]ie in einem Brennspiegel […] alle Probleme, alle Tendenzen, und alle Antinomien des Volkerrechts der zweiten Jahrhunderthalfte gebundelt“ haben (Grewe 1984, S. 805). Zu diesen Antinomien zahlt die Spannung zwischen „Ansatze[n] zu einem Volkerrecht der Kooperation und Solidaritat“ auf der einen Seite und dem „Ruckfall in ein enges, egoistisches Souveranitatsdenken“ auf der anderen Seite (Grewe 1984, S. 805). Die Spannung spiegelt sich auch noch im aus der Konferenz hervorgehenden Seerechtsubereinkommen der VN (SRU).

Coping with Institutional Challenges for Arctic Environmental Governance

This chapter explores new avenues for the analysis of the Arctic Council as a pre-eminent forum in a globally embedded and embedding regional space. The author focuses on the fragmentation of Arctic environmental governance and asks which functions the Arctic Council would need to perform in order to actively and effectively manage institutional interplay. These tasks comprise commitment, collaboration, coordination, cooperation, compliance, and controlling. Based on these functional tasks, the chapter zooms in on the institutional challenges for the Arctic Council with regard to the inclusion of actors, integration of issue areas, and information provision about policy implementation and impact.