Creating Regimes: Arctic Accords and International Governance 9781501711411

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acronyms and Abbreviations
CHAPTER ONE. The Stages of International Regime Formation
CHAPTER TWO. International Cooperation in the Arctic
CHAPTER THREE. Agenda Formation: The Finnish Initiative and the Norwegian Initiative
CHAPTER FOUR. Negotiation: The Roads to Rovaniemi and Kirkenes
CHAPTER FIVE. Operationalization: Activating the AEPS and the BEAR
CHAPTER SIX. Comparing the Stages of Regime Formation
Appendix A. DECORATION ON THE PROTECTION OF THE ARCTIC ENVIRONMENT
Appendix B. ARCTIC ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION STRATEGY
Appendix C. DECLARATION ON COOPERATION IN THE BARENTS EURO-ARCTIC REGION
Index

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C R E A T I N G

Regimes

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C R E A T I N G

Regimes ARCTIC ACCORDS AND

International Governance

Oran R. Young

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

The U.S. National Science Foundation supported this study under the terms of grant #OPP-9320559. Copyright © 1998 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1998 by Cornell University Press. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Young, Oran R. Creating regimes : Arctic accords and international governance / Oran R. Young, p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-8014-3437-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Arctic regions—International status. 2. International cooperation. I. Title. KZ4110.P65Y678 1997 341.2'9—dc21 97-28852 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are also either recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. Cloth printing

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Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

APPENDIX C

Preface

vii

Acronyms and Abbreviations

xi

The Stages of International Regime Formation

1

International Cooperation in the Arctic

29

Agenda Formation: The Finnish Initiative and the Norwegian Initiative

52

Negotiation: The Roads to Rovaniemi and Kirkenes

86

Operationalization: Activating the AEPS and the BEAR

122

Comparing the Stages of Regime Formation

168

Declaration on the Protection of the Arctic Environment

200

Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy

202

Declaration on Cooperation in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region

217

Index

223 V

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Preface

This book, like several of its predecessors, is the product of an intellectual dialogue between my long-term theoretical interests in the role of institutions in international society and my applied interests in a range of issues involving the Arctic as a region of growing importance in world affairs. For me, the opportunity to merge these disparate streams of thought has proved extraordinarily beneficial. Together, the establishment of the Arctic Council through the signing of a ministerial declaration in Ottawa on 19 September 1996 and the completion of this book at virtually the same moment constitute the latest phase in this productive relationship. Once operational, the Arctic Council may initiate an era in which the opportunities to combine theory and practice in the Arctic become even more substantial. Because the choice of the Arctic as a region to emphasize in a book devoted to international institutions may seem surprising to some readers, a few introductory observations about the emerging role of this region in world affairs are in order. Throughout the Cold War, the political dynamics of the Arctic seemed remarkably simple and, in the eyes of many, essentially derivative. The high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere were effectively split into two opposing and for the most part standoffish camps, with the Soviet Union controlling nearly half the region's land area and coastal waters on one side and the rest of the ice states—Canada, Denmark/Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and the United States—closely allied as members of NATO on the other. What is more, political relations in the Far North during this period typically ran along North/South lines and focused on interactions between southern metropoles and northern hinterlands, which reinforced the sense that the region was of little interest to students of international cooperation. Given this inauspicious beginning, the recent growth of interest in the Arctic as a distinct region in international society and the proliferation of initiatives aimed at promoting sustained international cooperation in the Far North constitute a remarkable political development. Partly, this turn of events is attributable to the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, a resultant decline in the preoccupation with Europe among vii

viii

PREFACE

those concerned with international security, and a growing interest in the region as a comparatively secure source of raw materials. In part, the rising tide of interest in the north polar region is a product of an emerging awareness of the role of the Arctic in global environmental processes, the discovery of the Arctic on the part of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) concerned with environmental issues, and the political maturation of the region's indigenous peoples. These developments have triggered both a lively debate about appropriate institutional arrangements for the Arctic and a gathering interest in an interrelated set of issues that make up the region's political agenda. This book focuses on two of the most interesting recent institutional initiatives in the Arctic—the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR). As case studies they provide empirical materials for an inquiry dealing with new ideas about the processes involved in the formation of international regimes. The AEPS is a regionwide arrangement established by the eight Arctic countries in 1991 to protect the environment of high northern latitudes. For its part, the BEAR is a subregional arrangement launched in 1993 by Finland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden as a response both to the new political architecture of Europe and to more circumscribed issues relating to sustainable development in the northernmost part of Europe. In many ways, this book is a logical extension of Polar Politics: Creating International Environmental Regimes (Cornell University Press, 1993), a collective work in which a sizable group of colleagues and I document our effort to test a battery of well-known hypotheses relating to regime formation against evidence derived from five Arctic cases. That work led to the conclusion that we need to think hard about multivariate relationships in the effort to understand the process of regime formation; simple generalizations spelling out necessary or sufficient conditions for regimes to form in international society are not likely to fare well when subjected to empirical testing. In winding up that project, it dawned on me that one of the problems in theorizing about the process of regime formation is that our analytic constructs generally treat this process in undifferentiated terms, whereas the creation stories of actual cases point to a series of recognizable and relatively regular stages in the overall process. This led in turn to the central idea of this book: the process of regime formation involves at least three distinct stages—I call them agenda formation, negotiation, and operationalization—and the political dynamics of the three stages are by no means the same. It follows that propositions about the process of regime formation that fail to take these differences into account are unlikely to fare well when

Preface

ix

subjected to empirical testing. From this realization, it was a short step to the development of a series of hypotheses spelling out differences in the political dynamics of the three stages. A particular attraction of this analytic strategy is that it lends itself to the conduct of natural experiments as a means of exploring the fit between hypotheses and evidence drawn from actual cases of regime formation. Each of the hypotheses I explore in this book points to differences among the stages of regime formation that should show up in the creation story of any regime we choose to examine in detail. Naturally, the completion of a few case studies is not sufficient to prove anything about the ultimate merit or validity of these hypotheses. But the emphasis on differences among the stages of regime formation does make it possible to treat each case as a self-contained test of the expectations derived from the analytic treatment of the three stages. Given my personal involvement with the international relations of the Circumpolar North over the last decade, the choice of Arctic cases as vehicles for the exploration of generic issues relating to the role of institutions in international society has allowed me to probe deeply the processes involved and to answer questions that I would have been unable to resolve through an examination of the written record alone. Above all, the focus on Arctic cases has provided access to a wide range of knowledgeable people in all the Arctic countries, many of whom have participated in the events discussed in this book. I have not attributed specific statements about facts or ideas to individuals out of respect for their privacy. But many of the insights described in this work owe a great deal to my interactions with these Arctic hands over the years, and information on the cases that is otherwise unattributed in the text comes for the most part from my discussions with these individuals. It is a distinct pleasure for me to record my debt to the following people: Sherburne Abbott, Pekka Aikio, Adele Airoldi, Oleg Andreev, Steinar Andresen, Per Antonsen, Alexander Arikaynen, Thomas Armbruster, Raymond Arnaudo, Jan Arvesen, Garth Bangay, E. U. Curtis Bohlen, Lawson W. Brigham, Rune Castberg, Sanjay Chaturvedi, Jan Ake Dellenbrandt, Juan Carlos di Primo, Pavel Dzubenko, Desiree Edmar, Anne Fikkan, Franklyn Griffiths, Scott Hajost, Lassi Heininen, Hans Jakob Helms, Alf Hakon Hoel, Sverre Jervell, Charles Johnson, Philip Johnson, Jyrki Kakonen, Paula Kankaanpaa, Anders Karlqvist, Taino Kiekko, Stephanie Smith Kinney, Karsten Klepsvik, Valentin Koropalov, John Mikal Kvistad, Elizabeth Leighton, Finn Lynge, Margus Lyre, Magnus Magnusson, Otto Memelund, Kari Mottola, Elena Nikitina, Ove Rosing Olsen, Mats-Olov Olsson, Gail Osherenko, Willy 0streng, Jakob Ostrovsky, Jeanne Pagnan, Patricia Perkins, Tauno Pesola, Oddrunn Pettersen, Pal Prestrud, Peter Prokosch, Heikki Puurinen,

x

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Risto Rautiainen, Jan Einar Reiersen, Lars-Otto Reiersen, Alexei Roginko, Odd Rogne, Donald Rothwell, Dalee Sambo, Loren Setlow, Olav Schram Stokke, Bo Svensson, Fred Roots, David Scrivener, Robert Senseney, David Shakespeare, J0rgen Taagholt, Monica Tennberg, Jan Thompson, Ola Tunander, Raphael Vartanov, Galina Voropaeva, Ulf Wiberg, Leslie Whitby, and Alexander Yakovlev. Though I have relied heavily on information and ideas arising from conversations with these people, I hasten to add that none of them bears responsibility for the conclusions I reach. My staff at the Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College has done much to make it possible for me to continue an active research program while handling a variety of administrative responsibilities. Nicki Maynard, the Institute's office manager, juggles a large number of daily demands thrown her way by numerous staff members pursing their own individual projects. Kay McCabe, our grants coordinator, has taken over all the accounting and record keeping associated with research funded under the terms of external grants and contracts. Julia Lloyd Wright handled all things pertaining to the International Conference on Arctic Research Planning (ICARP)—a large and complex international conference that took place at Dartmouth in December 1995, during the writing of this book. The fact that I have been able to complete this project on schedule is testimony to the quality of their work. Finally, I want to record here my appreciation for the material support that made this project possible. Funding for my research came from the Office of Polar Programs within the National Science Foundation under the terms of grant #OPP-9320559. The development of the contacts I have relied on in connection with this project owes much to the earlier support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which provided funding starting in 1987 for the establishment and operation of the Working Group on Arctic International Relations. That group, which involved both practitioners and analysts from all the Arctic states, played a role of some importance in the emergence of the idea of the Arctic as a distinct region in policy terms over the last decade. As co-chair of the group, I was able not only to make helpful contacts but also to engage in a creative dialogue about Arctic international relations with a sizable group of well-informed colleagues during a critical period in the recent history of the Arctic. ORAN R. YOUNG Hanover, New Hampshire October 1996

Acronyms and Abbreviations

AEPS

Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy

AMAP

Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AEPS)

AMATF

Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Task Force

AOSIS

Alliance of Small Island States

ATCMs

Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings

ATCPs

Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties

BEAR

Barents Euro-Arctic Region

CAFF

Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (AEPS)

CEC

Commission of the European Community

CG

Coast Guard (U.S.)

CSCE

Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe

CSO

Committee of Senior Officials (BEAR)

DFO

Department of Fisheries and Oceans (Canada)

DIAND

Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (Canada)

DNR

Department of Natural Resources (Canada)

DOE

Department of Environment (Canada)

EBRD

European Bank for Reconstruction and Development

EMEP

Environmental Monitoring and Evaluation Programme

EPA

Environmental Protection Agency (U.S.)

EPPR

Emergency Prevention, Preparedness, and Response in the Arctic (AEPS)

EU

European Union

FWS

Fish and Wildlife Service (U.S.)

G-77

Group of 77

Goskomsever

State Committee on Northern Development (Russia)

HODs

Heads of delegations xi

xii

ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

Hydromet

State Committee on Hydrometeorology (Russia)

IAPG

Interagency Arctic Policy Group (U.S.)

IASC

International Arctic Science Committee

ICARP

International Conference for Arctic Research Planning

ICC

Inuit Circumpolar Conference

LRTAP Regime

Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution Regime

Minpriroda

Ministry of the Environment (Russia)

NAMMCO

North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission

NEFCO

Nordic Environmental Finance Corporation

NILU

Norwegian Institute for Air Research

NIVA

Norwegian Institute for Water Research

NOAA

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (U.S.)

OMB

Office of Management and Budget (U.S.)

ONR

Office of Naval Research (U.S.)

PAME

Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment (AEPS)

SALT

Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty

SAAOs

Senior Arctic Affairs Officials (AEPS)

SOAER

State of the Arctic Environment Report

TACIS

Technical Assistance to the Commonwealth of Independent States

TEK

Traditional Ecological Knowledge

TFSDU

Task Force on Sustainable Development and Utilization (AEPS)

WWF

Worldwide Fund for Nature

C R E A T I N G

Regimes

Barents Euro-Arctic Region

Map source: Same as map at left Cartography by Nat Case, Hedberg Maps, Inc.

Arctic Region

10°C July Isotherm Treeline Arctic Circle Continuous permafrost Icecap or permanent ice pack Map source: CAFF Habitat Conservation Report Number 2, Data by UNEP/GRID-Arendal, March 1996. Used by permission. Cartography by Nat Case, Hedberg Maps, Inc.

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CHAPTER ONE

The Stages of International Regime Formation

T

he study of the processes through which international regimes—or, in other words, sets of rules, decisionmaking procedures, and programs that define social practices—come into existence has become a growth industry during the last ten to fifteen years.1 Much of the resultant body of literature contains extended case studies or creation stories that are atheoretical in the sense that they are not guided by any underlying model or explicitly stated hypotheses about the determinants of regime formation. During the 1980s, however, the theoretical sophistication of American scholarship in this area increased markedly. Recently, interest in this subject has spread rapidly to Europe and beyond as well.2 There is every reason to believe, at this juncture, that the subject will continue to be a focus of scholarly attention for some time to come. Yet there is a sense in which the results of this scholarly endeavor leave something to be desired. We remain unable to explain convincingly why some efforts to establish regimes succeed while others fail, much less to predict the trajectories and the ultimate outcomes of ongoing efforts to create new institutional arrangements at the international level. The limitations of the existing literature on regime formation are in part products of methodological difficulties, such as lingering differences regarding how to bound the category of regimes and the ever present danger of selection bias in the choice of actual regimes to be used as cases in the study of regime formation.3 Insofar as this is the case, it should be possible to make progress by paying greater attention to methodological rigor and, especially, by making an increased effort to coordinate our practices regarding such matters.

1. Stephan Haggard and Beth A. Simmons, "Theories of International Regimes," International Organization 41 (Summer 1987): 491-517; and Oran R. Young and Gail Osherenko, eds., Polar Politics: Creating International Environmental Regimes, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. 2. Volker Rittberger, ed., Regime Theory and International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. 3. Marc A. Levy, Oran R. Young, and Michael Ziirn, "The Study of International Regimes," European Journal of International Relations 1 (September 1995): 267-330. 1

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In part, these shortcomings in the study of regime formation are a consequence of the propensity of regime analysts to seize on single-factor explanations that turn out to be of limited value when they are subjected to sustained empirical examination. The classic case in point is surely hegemonic stability theory—a line of reasoning that emphasized the need for initiatives on the part of a single dominant actor (i.e., a hegemon) to ensure success in efforts to form regimes and that is now largely discredited.4 But somewhat similar observations are in order about efforts to highlight the significance of other individual factors, like the underlying nature of the problem to be solved or the role of epistemic communities.5 The solution to this difficulty surely lies in a greater emphasis on multivariate analysis, even though this means giving up the ideal of framing simple propositions that state necessary or sufficient conditions for regime formation to occur.6 In this study, by contrast, I argue that a major source of the limitations afflicting our understanding of regime formation lies in the facts that the process through which new institutional arrangements come into existence virtually always encompasses several distinct stages and that the political dynamics characteristic of the different stages are by no means the same. As I explain in some detail in this chapter and illustrate in depth through case studies in later chapters, the overall process of regime formation divides into three stages that I call agenda formation, negotiation, and operationalization. Efforts to form international regimes may make it through any one of these stages but stall at the next stage. Some issues fail to capture an acknowledged spot on the international political agenda. Others have difficulty achieving a high enough priority on this agenda to trigger the initiation of explicit negotiations. Still others stimulate negotiations in which the participants are unable to reach closure on the terms of a regime. Even signed agreements sometimes become dead letters. Only by successfully navigating all three stages can a regime that has real consequences for the nature of collective outcomes come into existence. What is more—and this is the important point for my purposes—because the three stages of regime formation differ from one another with regard to their political dynamics, efforts to explain success or failure in this realm on the basis of propositions or models that assume a seamless or uniform 4. The theoretical limitations of hegemonic stability theory are discussed in Duncan Snidal, "The Limits of Hegemonic Stability Theory," International Organization 39 (Autumn 1985): 579-614. Empirical evidence is examined in Young and Osherenko, eds., Polar Politics. 5. Volker Rittberger, ed., International Regimes in East-West Politics, London: Pinter, 1990; and Peter M. Haas, ed., Knowledge, Power, and International Policy Coordination, a special issue of International Organization 46 (1992): 1-390. 6. Young and Osherenko, eds., Polar Politics, chap. 7.

The Stages of International Regime Formation

3

process are doomed to failure. A satisfactory account of regime formation, one that can explain actual occurrences convincingly, will require separate but interconnected propositions concerning the several stages of the overall process. To lend substance to this analysis, I rely on two extended case studies. One deals with an arrangement known as the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, an emergent multilateral environmental regime that includes all eight of the Arctic nations as members and that is modeled loosely on the Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP) Regime for Europe. The second case focuses on an arrangement called the Barents EuroArctic Region, a recently established regime that deals with a range of issues of growing concern to northern Europeans in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. This regime seeks to establish cooperative links between northern Fennoscandia and the northwestern region of Russia at a variety of levels, from the local to the regional. In addition to the fact that they deal with emerging patterns of multilateral cooperation in the Circumpolar North, these regimes have two other notable features in common. First, they are both "soft" law arrangements in the sense that they are based on ministerial declarations in contrast to legally binding conventions or treaties.7 This means, among other things, that the constitutive documents setting forth the initial provisions of these arrangements did not have to go through a formal ratification process, a fact that has significant implications for the final or operationalization stage of regime formation. Second, these are both regimes that center on the initiation of programmatic activities expected to give rise to increasingly complex social practices rather than on the articulation of a collection of regulative rules.8 As a result, the behavioral expectations associated with these regimes highlight matters defined in terms of levels of effort as much as, or even more than, compliance with specific rules. In most other respects, however, the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region are normal or typical regimes. I make no claims that these cases are representative of the expanding universe of international regimes or that it is possible to generalize in any formal sense from an examination of only two cases. Yet, I believe 7. For evidence of the rapid growth in the use of soft law in international society, see W E. Burhenne, ed., International Environmental Soft Law: Collection of Relevant Instruments, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1993. 8. For an extended case study of LRTAP treated in these terms, see Marc A. Levy, "European Acid Rain: The Power of Tote-Board Diplomacy," in Peter M. Haas, Robert O. Keohane, and Marc A. Levy, eds., Institutions for the Earth: Sources of Effective International Environmental Protection, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, 73-132.

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that detailed reconstructions of the creation stories associated with these cases will provide an adequate basis for exploring my central thesis concerning differences among the stages of regime formation and the need to take these differences into account in the development of a full-fledged theory of regime formation. Stages of Regime Formation With few exceptions, the formation of international regimes or governance systems features a process aimed at reaching agreement on packages of mutually acceptable provisions suitable for expression in documents that are treated as constitutive contracts.9 Although they do not always take the form of binding agreements having the force of law, such documents are important benchmarks in the sense that they constitute evidence of the defining or constitutive characteristics of institutional arrangements as understood by their creators. In some cases, the process of reaching agreement is long and drawn out. It took eight years, for instance, to negotiate the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and another twelve years before it entered into force, in 1994.10 In other cases, the full process of regime formation involves a series of incremental steps that unfold over a number of years. This is especially true when the process starts with the adoption of a framework convention, like the 1979 Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution, and encompasses a series of efforts to flesh out the regime through the addition of substantive protocols—such as the 1985 protocol on sulfur dioxide; the 1988 protocol on nitrogen oxide; the 1991 protocol on volatile organic compounds; and the 1994 revised sulfur protocol, in the case of the transboundary air pollution regime.11 But in virtually every case, the process of regime formation in international society centers on the establishment of social practices intended to guide the subsequent behavior of those involved in the relevant issue area. For purposes of analysis, it is helpful to divide the overall cycle of regime formation into at least three stages: the agenda formation stage, the negotiation stage, and the operationalization stage.12 The central and 9. Levy, Young, and Ziirn, "Study of International Regimes." 10. Robert L. Friedheim, Negotiating the New Ocean Regime, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. 11. Levy, "European Acid Rain." 12. To some extent, these distinctions parallel familiar concepts used by observers of the cycle of public policymaking in domestic settings. In such discussions, agenda setting involves framing an issue for inclusion on the legislative calendar, negotiation covers the process culminating in the enactment of a law, and operationalization centers on the for-

The Stages of International Regime Formation

5

most extensively studied stage, which is dominated by institutional bargaining, begins with the initiation of direct and focused negotiations and ends with the signing of an agreement.13 The negotiation stage in the case of the law of the sea, for example, began with the opening session of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea in New York in 1973 and closed with the signing of the 1982 convention in Montego Bay. The much shorter negotiation stage in the case of climate change started with the first session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Climate Change in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in February 1991 and came to an end—at least for this initial round of regime formation—with the signing of the Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. The agenda formation stage and the operationalization stage, on this account, bracket the stage of negotiation. Agenda formation encompasses the processes through which an issue initially finds its way onto the international political agenda and rises to a sufficiently prominent place on this agenda to justify the investment of time and political capital needed to embark on explicit negotiations. For its part, the operationalization stage covers those steps needed to move the provisions of an international regime from paper to practice. The process during this stage typically involves both domestic actions like the ratification of a treaty within the political systems of prospective regime members and international actions like setting up the administrative apparatus called for in the relevant constitutive contract. As the case of the failed 1988 Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities makes clear, this part of the process can pose problems that prove insurmountable in specific cases.14 These analytic distinctions are not always easy to maintain in practice. The three stages can and often do overlap, making it difficult to define a neat chronological separation of the stages in actual cases of regime formation. The agenda formation stage, for instance, sometimes involves hard bargaining over the identity of the parties to be accepted as participants in the negotiations to follow or the functional scope of a proposed mulation and promulgation of regulations needed to make the transition from paper to practice. For a well-known account of this cycle, see Charles E. Lindblom, The PolicyMaking Process, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968. These categories are applied to an environmental case in Gary C. Bryner, Blue Skies, Green Politics: The Clean Air Act of 1990, Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1993. 13. Oran R. Young, International Governance: Protecting the Environment in a Stateless Society, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, chaps. 4 and 5. 14. Arnfinn Jorgensen-Dahl and Willy 0streng, eds., The Antarctic Treaty System in World Politics, New York: St. Martin's, 1991; and Olav Schram Stokke and Davor Vidas, eds., Governing the Antarctic: The Effectiveness and Legitimacy of the Antarctic Treaty System, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

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institutional arrangement. Similarly, those negotiating the terms of a constitutive contract may seek to redefine the nature of the problem, even while they are hammering out the terms of an international accord. These matters become even more complex in cases where regimes are created piecemeal, as in the current practice of starting with a framework agreement and fleshing out the terms of a regime over time with a series of substantive protocols. In such cases, the negotiation stage may commence with regard to specific protocols while the parties are still operationalizing the terms of the initial framework agreement. And there is nothing to preclude the parties from seizing the opportunity afforded by the negotiation of additional protocols to redefine the nature of the problem that the whole arrangement addresses. In cases like ozone depletion where the nature of our understanding of the problem is evolving rapidly, this sort of substantive restatement of the problem is a common occurrence.15 Nonetheless, the division of the overall process of regime formation into analytically distinct stages can help us to broaden and deepen our understanding of the phenomenon of regime formation at the international level. The fundamental reason for this conclusion lies in the distinctive character of the political dynamic characteristic of each of the stages of regime formation. To sharpen this point, I turn now to a more detailed account of each of the three stages. Next I compare and contrast these stages and, in the process, frame some hypotheses that will serve as a basis for organizing the detailed accounts of the formation of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region that follow in the substantive chapters of this book. Agenda Formation The emergence of issues on the active political agenda at the international level is itself a political process.16 There are, of course, cases in which events on the ground make it hard for policymakers to ignore issues. Few would argue with the need to reexamine the Arctic's role in the global strategic balance in the wake of the Cold War; much the same is true of the need to consider the management of foreign direct investment in the oil and gas fields of northern Russia following the collapse of the Soviet 15. Edward A. Parson, "Protecting the Ozone Layer," in Haas, Keohane, and Levy, eds., Institutions for the Earth, 27-73. 16. Janice Stein, ed., Getting to the Table: The Processes of International Prenegotiation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. For a seminal account of the comparable process at the domestic level, see John W Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, 2d ed., New York: Harper Collins, 1995.

The Stages of International Regime Formation

7

Union. But in many—some would say most—cases, issues do not force their way onto the active political agenda as a result of changes in preexisting relationships or newly emerging activities on the ground. This is certainly true of most environmental issues in the Circumpolar North, which are far from trivial but have not been brought vividly to the attention of attentive publics by crises—such as the revelation of the occurrence of the Antarctic ozone hole in the case of stratospheric ozone—or by a concerted effort on the part of the scientific community, as in the case of climate change.17 Similar observations are in order about the emergence of the Barents Region as an international issue. To be sure, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the changing political architecture of Europe had raised far-reaching concerns in the minds of some policymakers, especially among those associated with Europe's smaller, affluent democracies.18 Additionally, the economic problems of the northern counties of the Scandinavian countries were on the rise as the 1980s turned into the 1990s. Still, there was no relevant precedent for focusing on the Barents Region as an area to be singled out for attention in public policy arenas, much less as an area particularly well-suited to the pursuit of Nordic/Russian cooperation. In such cases, issues often make their way onto the active political agenda when they acquire champions or, in other words, actors—usually but not always states and their representatives—that adopt them, pushing the issues to the top of their own scale of priorities and expending political capital in an effort to persuade others to recognize the issues as priority agenda items. It is no accident, then, that the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy is widely known as the Finnish Initiative or that the Barents Euro-Arctic Region is generally referred to as the Norwegian Initiative.19 This is not to say these developments could have come to pass without the active involvement of a variety of other players, including nonstate actors as well as key states. But it is equally clear that the chances of these issues making it onto the active political agenda would have been 17. For the example of Arctic haze, see Marvin S. Soroos, "Arctic Haze and Transboundary Air Pollution: Conditions Governing Success and Failure," in Young and Osherenko, eds., Polar Politics, 186-222. 18. Sverre Jervell, "A Report from Europe's Northern Periphery," in Mare Kukk, Sverre Jervell, and Pertti Joenniemi, eds., The Baltic Sea Area: A Region in the Making, Oslo: Europa-programmet, 1992, 13-25. 19. Oran R. Young, ed., Arctic Environmental Cooperation, a special issue of Current Research on Peace and Violence 12 (1989); and Alf Hakon Hoel, Geir Runar Karlsen, and Andreas Breivik, "Resources, Development and the Environment in the Arctic," in Arctic Challenges: A Report from the Nordic Council's Parliamentary Conference in Reykjavik 16-17 August 1993, Stockholm: Nordic Council, 1993, 65-100.

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slim in the absence of Finland's decision to act as champion in the one case and Norway's decision to play the same role in the other. The fact that an issue makes its way onto the active political agenda says almost nothing about how key players will frame or cast it for purposes of policy consideration.20 Every issue can be approached or construed in a variety of ways. It is possible to think of environmental protection in the Arctic, for example, as a special case of coming to terms with global environmental concerns or as a regional issue with a distinct character of its own. Even among those who adopt a regional perspective, there are sharp differences between those who focus on individual pollutants (e.g., radionuclides, organochlorines, heavy metals) and those who approach the issue in ecosystems terms and direct their attention to the calculation of critical loads. Even more specifically, policymakers who think in terms of individual pollutants divide into those who concentrate on ambient air or water quality standards and those who focus on transboundary fluxes. These alternative perspectives on environmental issues have undoubted political significance. Given, for example, their concern about sulfur dioxide emanating from the nickel smelters of the Kola Peninsula and crossing the frontier into Finland, with severe consequences for northern forests, it easy to understand why the Finns emphasized the problem of controlling transboundary fluxes of specific pollutants in their thinking about the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy. Similarly, there is no mystery about Canada's role as a champion of the conservation of Arctic flora and fauna in the evolution of this environmental regime. Nevertheless, it would be a serious mistake to assume that the framing of issues for purposes of policy consideration is entirely a matter of the manipulative efforts of interested parties. Issues frequently acquire a momentum of their own that is difficult to guide, much less to control. It seems undeniable, for instance, that the example of LRTAP became a powerful force in directing thinking about the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, though it is by no means clear that anyone made a conscious effort to make this happen or that this conceptualization of the problem was particularly favorable to the interests of one or another of the participants. What is more, the fact that alternative perspectives on issues are often advocated by different players in the process of regime formation means that strategic interaction regularly becomes a factor in the framing of policy 20. For a particularly well-known account of the framing of issues in domestic policy settings, see Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. A case study discussing these issues at the international level can be found in Thomas Bernauer, "Between CostSharing, Side Payments and Polluter Pays," unpublished paper, 1994.

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issues. This can and often does mean that elements of ambiguity driven by the need to arrive at politically acceptable compromises creep into the framing of policy issues. Alternatively, it may allow distinctive perspectives on issues, which are not championed by any of the major players, to become influential in the policy process. The emergence of an issue on the active political agenda and its acquisition of a recognizable form in policy terms are major achievements. But they do not guarantee that the issue will attain a high enough priority on the agenda to trigger movement to the next stage—negotiation—of the process of regime formation. The international political agenda is always overcrowded or congested; many issues do not move up to the front burner for a long time, and some remain on the back burner indefinitely. What factors operate to govern which issues move forward? There are, to be sure, cases in which the flow of events simply takes over and forces policymakers to allocate time and energy to dealing with the relevant issues. Something of this sort may be said about international response to the inner turmoil afflicting certain "failed states"—like Somalia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda—although it is striking how reluctant policymakers located elsewhere are to initiate concerted international responses to these dramatic crises.21 In more typical cases, by contrast, issues move up the scale of political priority and graduate to the stage of negotiation when influential individuals or groups adopt them and decide to invest their own political capital in moving them forward. The creation of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region exemplifies this phenomenon clearly. The issue became politically potent when the Norwegian foreign minister, Thorvald Stoltenberg, decided to make it a personal priority.22 But even this was not sufficient to trigger movement to the negotiation stage of regime formation. This movement occurred only in March 1992 when Stoltenberg presented the concept to the Russian foreign minister, Andre Kozyrev, and persuaded him to sign onto the idea of creating this regime as a matter of priority. The alliance between these central players galvanized others into action, and the shift to the negotiation stage took place without delay.23 One more range of concerns that deserve consideration under the heading of agenda formation come into focus with the movement toward the stage of negotiation at the international level. These involve pragmatic 21. The phenomenon of "failed states" is examined in Gerald Hellman and Steven R. Ratner, "Saving Failed States," Foreign Policy 89 (Winter 1992-93): 3-20. 22. Olav Schram Stokke and Ola Tunander, eds., The Barents Region: Cooperation in Arctic Europe, London: Sage Publications, 1994. 23. Ibid., esp. 1-8.

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matters, like the identification of players to be invited to participate, the setting in which negotiations will occur, the timing of the first round of negotiations, and remaining conceptual questions, like the breadth or narrowness of the items to be considered by the negotiators. Needless to say, many of these matters continue to be topics of interest in the course of actual negotiations. Yet there is much to be said, especially from the point of view of an issue's champions, for settling as many of these concerns as possible during the run up to the initiation of negotiations—in other words, as the final piece of the stage of agenda formation. Doing so allows the champions to put their stamp on the process of regime formation as clearly as possible—a matter of some concern to players who have invested heavily in political capital toward achieving the "right" outcome in the negotiations to follow. It follows, among other things, that the break between the agenda formation stage and the negotiation stage is not a sharp one in many cases of regime formation. In the case of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, for example, a lively debate about the participation of indigenous peoples' groups and other nonstate actors emerged following the initial negotiating session in Rovaniemi, Finland, and continued well into what became known as the Rovaniemi process.24 Likewise, the question of how to treat marine areas remained awkward throughout the process leading to the establishment of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region and continues to be a somewhat convoluted matter even now. Nonetheless, it is worth stressing that decisions regarding the shape of the negotiations to come, which have far-reaching consequences, are often taken at the end of the agenda formation stage. The dominant feature of the political dynamic that runs through all these elements of the agenda formation stage, setting it apart from the stages of negotiation and operationalization, is an atmosphere of openness and fluidity. Issues are not cast in concrete at this stage; the identity of those who will play major roles in subsequent stages is not fully determined, and the timing (or even the likelihood) of a move to the front burner of the policy agenda is difficult to predict. Small wonder, then, that many astute observers of politics have noted that those who succeed in controlling the stage of agenda formation have little to worry about even if their influence over the subsequent stages of policymaking—regime for24. Monica Tennberg, "Environmental Cooperation—The Case of the Rovaniemi Process," in Monica Tennberg, Harto Hakovirta, and Lassi Heininen, eds., Regional and Transnational Cooperation in the North, Rovaniemi: University of Lapland, 1994, 70-87.

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mation in the lexicon of this book—declines significantly.25 Yet agenda formation at the international level, much like the analogous process at the domestic level, remains far less carefully studied and consequently less well understood than the process of negotiation or institutional bargaining in the context of regime formation.26 Perhaps this is testimony to the fact that it is comparatively difficult to represent the interactions involved in agenda formation in rigorous analytic terms. But this in no way detracts from the importance of improving our knowledge of agenda formation as a critical step toward developing a more satisfactory understanding of the process of regime formation at the international level.

Negotiation In virtually every case, international regimes emerge from a process featuring explicit negotiations among a group of two or more actors seeking to reach agreement on the provisions of a document spelling out the terms of a constitutive contract.27 This does not mean that the participants enshrine all their goals or mutual understandings in the accords they adopt. Side agreements, some of which are deliberately kept secret, are common enough in connection with international negotiations. So are informal deals or tacit understandings that are not recorded at all.28 Likewise, the prominence of explicit accords in the process of regime formation does not mean that international regimes do not acquire informal elements that become important to the success of the resultant social practices over time. As in every other social setting, the meaning of the provisions of constitutive contracts at the international level is open to a variety of interpretations, and the operational content of these provisions becomes a matter to be clarified through practice. Above all, the emphasis on explicit agreements should not be taken to mean that the formation of international regimes always involves the negotiation of legally binding conventions or 25. J. Clarence Davies III, "How Does the Agenda Get Set?" in Edwin T. Haefele, ed., The Governance of Common Property Resources, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, 149-77. 26. William H. Riker, ed., Agenda Formation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993; and Christer Jonsson, Annica Young Kronsell, and Peter Soderholm, "AgendaSetting in International Cooperation," paper prepared for the 1995 annual convention of the International Studies Association. 27. In domestic politics, discussions of legislative bargaining often refer to the process through which "a bill becomes a law." For a well-known American example, see Eric Redman, The Dance of Legislation, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973. 28. Charles Lipson, "Why Are Some International Agreements Informal?" International Organization 45 (Autumn 1991): 495-538.

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treaties. Increasingly in recent years, diplomatic practice has turned to the use of agreements, like ministerial declarations, that are explicit but not legally binding in any formal sense. As I have noted, the regimes at the center of the case studies examined here exemplify this trend. In this connection, it is worth emphasizing at the outset that the foundation of these regimes through the negotiation of constitutive agreements taking the form of soft law need not impair their capacity to define the contents of influential social practices. Many legally binding agreements become dead letters; soft law arrangements that are notably successful are by no means uncommon.29 This said, it is important to observe that the institutional bargaining dominating the negotiation stage of regime formation differs from the vision of negotiation embedded in many studies of the bargaining process, and in a number of ways that have important consequences for this study.30 To begin with, institutional bargaining is a mixed-motive process through and through.31 It is not simply a means of reaching a mutually acceptable agreement at some point on a well-defined contract curve that can be modeled as a sequence of offers and counteroffers whose trajectory is governed by an identifiable concession mechanism.32 Naturally, the negotiations characteristic of regime formation are not cases of pure cooperation. These negotiations regularly involve hard bargaining in which participants do their best to exploit whatever bargaining leverage is available to them.33 Even so, there is a creative component to this process. The participants seldom have a clear picture of the payoff possibility set when they embark on negotiations; much of the negotiation process is exploratory in nature and involves efforts to expand the range of possibilities available. What is more, the agreement eventually reached often does no more than set a regime in motion, with the expectation that it will evolve and take on more substantive content as a response to experience with the regime in practice.

29. Peter H. Sand, "International Cooperation: The Environmental Experience," in Jessica Tuchman Mathews, ed., Preserving the Global Environment: The Challenge of Shared Leadership, New York: W.W Norton, 1991, 236-79. 30. The classic game-theoretic and microeconomic models of bargaining are presented and critiqued in Oran R. Young, ed., Bargaining: Formal Theories of Negotiation, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. On the differences between these models and the idea of institutional bargaining, see Young, International Governance, chap. 4. 31. Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. 32. John G. Cross, The Economics of Bargaining, New York: Basic Books, 1969. 33. Stephen D. Krasner, "Global Communications and National Power: Life on the Pareto Frontier," World Politics 43 (1991): 336-66.

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Both cases explored in this study exemplify this generative dynamic, which is a common feature of the negotiation stage of regime formation. Like LRTAP before it, the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy deals with a set of phenomena that are of growing concern to attentive publics in a number of countries but that are not well understood. One of its principal goals is to launch a social practice that will lead to more, and more accurate, information regarding the problems it addresses. For its part, the Barents Euro-Arctic Region constitutes one response to the collapse of the familiar postwar political order in Europe and the emergence of a period of remarkable and somewhat unsettling political fluidity. It is in many ways an adventure into uncharted political waters, some of whose features are unknown and unknowable at this time. A powerful motivator for those engaged in creating an international regime for the Barents Region was the idea of establishing a mechanism expected to become a force in guiding the evolution of a new political order covering the northernmost reaches of Europe. Unlike bargaining in most legislative settings, moreover, the institutional bargaining characteristic of the negotiation stage of regime formation aims at building consensus among as many participants as possible rather than putting together winning coalitions.34 Put another way, the preferred coalition among those negotiating the terms of a constitutive contract is the coalition of the whole. Thus, there was never any doubt that the ministerial declaration establishing the Arctic Environmental Protection strategy should be acceptable to all members of the Arctic Eight— Canada, Denmark/Greenland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States—and that the comparable declaration establishing the Barents Euro-Arctic Region should be congenial to the Nordic states and Russia. This feature of the process has several important implications. It gives every participant in the negotiation process real bargaining leverage. Other participants may make threats or offer all manner of side payments or adjustments in the provisions of the regime itself to bring a reluctant participant into the fold. But the ability of each participant to hold out for provisions it prefers greatly exceeds the ability of individual participants to get their way in situations where the objective is to form winning coalitions and, especially, minimum winning coalitions.35 This feature of the negotiation process also goes a long way toward explaining 34. On the consequences of employing different decision rules in social choice processes, see James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962. 35. William H. Riker, The Theory of Political Coalitions, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962.

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why regimes are often created through the promulgation of framework agreements that leave much to be resolved as the resultant practices develop. Anything more would be too much to expect all participants to accept, and there is always the hope that regimes will acquire a momentum of their own that carries participants along toward fleshing out the substantive content of the relevant arrangements with the passage of time. Here, too, both the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region are clear cases in point. The political dynamic arising from this feature of institutional bargaining is one that centers on consensus building and therefore on the crafting of constitutive contracts that are agreeable to all but not lacking in substance. Of course, nothing precludes resorting to the international equivalent of logrolling in crafting the texts of constitutive contracts, and this puts a premium on the deal making skills of political entrepreneurs in the negotiations giving rise to international regimes.36 A third difference between the institutional bargaining characteristic of regime formation and mainstream models of the negotiation process centers on the nature of the participants themselves. Whereas most models assume that the participants are unitary actors possessing well-defined preference structures and acting to maximize benefits to themselves defined in terms of these preferences, participants in actual processes of regime formation differ from this vision in several ways that are relevant to this discussion. Governments simply do not act as rational utility maximizers, even when there is little internal opposition to the initiatives they take. Rather, they tend to adopt causes, like the Norwegian government's espousal of a regime for the Barents Region, and then to advocate these causes in a determined manner in their dealings with others. We know also that there are apt to be differences among factions within governments over the provisions to be included in constitutive contracts (there may even be differences over the desirability of forming a regime in the first place)—a fact that has made us all aware of the phenomenon of twolevel games.37 Additionally, governments are subjected to pressures from a variety of interest groups active in the larger societies in whose names they act. The effects of these pressures can cause governments to behave in a contradictory or inconsistent manner in the negotiation process leading to regime formation at the international level. As the case of the Arc36. Oran R. Young, "Political Leadership and Regime Formation: On the Development of Institutions in International Society," International Organization 45 (Summer 1991): 281-308. 37. Peter B. Evans, Harold K. Jacobson, and Robert D. Putnam, eds., Double-Edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

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tic Environmental Protection Strategy suggests, such pressures can also take the form of nonstate actors becoming active in the negotiations themselves and espousing the inclusion of provisions that no government would push for on its own. Relative to the rather stilted process envisioned in most formal models of negotiation, the process of institutional bargaining at the international level is multidimensional and open-ended. Relative to the agenda formation stage in the process of regime formation, however, the negotiation stage is considerably more structured. Much is known at the beginning of this stage about the identity of the players, though this does not preclude the emergence of new participants along the way. The issues to be addressed are comparatively well-defined, although reformulations during the course of negotiations would not be out of bounds. In most cases, the process fairly quickly focuses on the development of a negotiating text, with the bulk of the effort then going to removing brackets surrounding passages on which there is initial disagreement.38 This is a setting in which there is often room for exercising bargaining leverage through the classic devices of committal tactics and the deployment of threats and promises. But above all this setting rewards the deal making skills of political entrepreneurs who know how to build coalitions around negotiating texts acceptable to all relevant parties. It would be a mistake to assume that the entrepreneurial techniques well known to students of legislative bargaining are equally applicable to institutional bargaining at the international level; there are fundamental differences between building winning coalitions on the provisions of statutes and fashioning coalitions of the whole around the provisions of constitutive contracts. Nonetheless, the hallmarks of political entrepreneurship are easily recognized in both settings.39 Operationalization It is easy to fall prey to the idea that the process of regime formation is over once the text of a convention or treaty is opened for signature or the provisions of a ministerial declaration agreed to and sent home to the relevant agencies. But this way of thinking leaves out the crucial third stage of regime formation.40 Constitutive contracts can collapse under their own 38. Gunnar Sjosted, ed., International Environmental Negotiation, Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1993; and I. William Zartman, ed., International Multilateral Negotiation: Approaches to the Management of Complexity, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994. 39. Young, "Political Leadership." 40. Bertram I. Spector and Anna R. Korula, "Problems of Ratifying International Environmental Agreements: Overcoming Initial Obstacles in the Post-agreement Negotiation Process," Global Environmental Change (December 1993): 369-81.

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weight or be bypassed by rapidly changing circumstances on the ground. I have already mentioned the disintegration of the 1988 Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities as a prominent case in point. While complete disintegration of this sort is unusual, less dramatic but still far-reaching problems arising during the operationalization stage are more common. Sometimes agreements are operationalized in forms that depart substantially from the intentions of their creators, like the Covenant of the League of Nations in the absence of the United States as a member. In other cases, agreements retain some de facto significance even when they never acquire the force of law in formal terms. The SALT II agreement, negotiated between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1970s, constitutes a clear example.41 It is easy to see from these observations that the operationalization of regimes is just as much a political process as agenda formation or the negotiation of the terms of conventions or declarations. And what is particularly important for purposes of this study, operationalization has a political dynamic of its own that sets it apart from the preceding stages and helps explain why efforts to understand the process of regime formation on the basis of propositions covering all three stages at once are doomed to failure. It is useful to draw a distinction between two components of the process of operationalization: the international component and the internal or domestic component.42 The international component involves the establishment of whatever apparatus is needed to administer or manage a regime on an ongoing basis. There are regimes in which this international component of operationalization is minimal. The five-nation 1973 agreement on polar bears, for example, leaves the managerial tasks to the individual range states and merely endorses the efforts of the preexisting Polar Bear Specialist Group operating under the auspices of the World Conservation Union.43 At the opposite extreme is the International Seabed Authority and Enterprise arrangement envisioned under the terms of Part XI of the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea. This elaborate mechanism, which aroused so much opposition in major industrialized countries like the United States that it will never become operational in its original

41. Raymond Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985. 42. Accounts of the operationalization of domestic policies are generally included under the broader rubric of implementation. For a well-known American example, see Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky, Implementation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. 43. Anne Fikkan, Gail Osherenko, and Alexander Arikainen, "Polar Bears: The Importance of Simplicity," in Young and Osherenko, eds., Polar Politics, 96-151.

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form,44 would have set in place an international organization capable not only of raising revenues on its own but also of participating directly in the business of deep seabed mining.45 The internal component, by contrast, covers steps regime members take to translate the provisions of regimes from paper to practice within their own jurisdictions. These steps, which may range from the ratification of treaties or conventions to the drafting and publication of executive directives covering the implementation of soft law agreements, obviously vary from one regime member to another. But they all have to do with bringing the provisions of a regime to bear on the actions of subjects, whether these are private actors like major corporations or public entities like government agencies responsible for managing the public domain. The international component of operationalization centers on the processes involved in moving from the signing of an agreement to the emergence of a set of procedural arrangements or programmatic activities at the international level. In some cases, the parties agree to act as though the provisions of a regime were already in force, even while awaiting ratification or other formal signs of operationalization on the part'of individual members.46 In many cases, there are provisions for preparatory committees to take certain steps during the transitional period. The efforts of the preparatory committee for the new law of the sea regime constitute a clear case in point. A slightly different approach to this task can be seen in the decision to have the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for Climate Change continue to meet on a regular basis during the interval between the signing of the Framework Convention on Climate Change in June 1992 and the first meeting of the Conference of the Parties following the entry into force of the convention, an event that occurred in March 1995.47 Even more pertinent to the concerns of this study are the efforts that are required to create the organizations called for under the provisions of a regime and that are needed to carry out the ongoing tasks envisioned by the regime's creators. In the case of the Arctic Environmental Protection 44. "Law of the Sea Forum: The 1994 Agreement on Implementation of the Seabed Provisions of the Convention on the Law of the Sea," American Journal of International Law 88 (1994): 687-714. 45. James K. Sebenius, Negotiating the Law of the Sea: Lessons in the Art and Science of Reaching Agreement, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. 46. Sand, "International Cooperation." 47. David G. Victor, with Abram Chayes and Eugene B. Skolnikoff, "Pragmatic Approaches to Regime Building for Complex International Problems," in Nazli Choucri, ed., Global Accord: Environmental Challenges and International Responses, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, 452-74; and David G. Victor and Julian E. Salt, "From Rio to Berlin: Managing Climate Change," Environment 36 (December 1994): 6-15 and 25-32.

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Strategy, this meant, above all, activating the working groups called for in the AEPS. This effort focused, in the first instance, on setting up the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP), an organization which is obviously inspired by the role the Environmental Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (EMEP) has played in the European Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution Regime and which is based in Oslo, with material support provided by the government of Norway. The analogous effort in the case of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region was even more complex, for it encompassed the initiation of both a Barents Euro-Arctic Council with representatives of the relevant national governments and a Barents Regional Council with participants from the subnational units of government located in the region and a secretariat based in Kirkenes. Here, too, there is a concern as to where operationalization leaves off and the dayto-day operation of a regime takes over. For my purposes, the activation of AMAP and the setting up of the Barents councils constitute the end points of the international component of operationalization in these cases. What these entities—and others taking shape more recently—have proceeded to do in carrying out their mandates and how well they have succeeded in these endeavors are matters of regime operation, which I leave to those concerned with evaluating the effectiveness or the performance of these regimes. It is common to treat the internal component of operationalization as a process featuring the ratification of a convention or treaty, the passage of implementing legislation, and the promulgation of regulations to put the provisions of the legislation into practice. In fact, such a process does occur in many cases of regime formation. But this vision of the internal operationalization of regimes leaves much to be desired. One difficulty is that it is based on the political practices of the United States. Although some other states follow roughly similar procedures, many states operationalize their international commitments in a different manner—a fact that alerts us both to the need for a comparative perspective in thinking about operationalization and to the prospect that the political dynamic of this stage of regime formation is apt to be less straightforward than the political dynamics of the other stages. Even more important in the context of this study is the fact that more and more international commitments now take the form of soft law that does not trigger any requirement for the formalities of ratification and implementing legislation.48 Even in the United States, where Congress tends to be more assertive with regard to 48. This is not to say, however, that the process is random or haphazard. Many governments have explicit directives covering the operationalization of soft law agreements.

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international commitments than legislatures in other countries, the efforts involved in operationalizing the provisions of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy have been almost entirely administrative in nature. In such instances, the dynamic of operationalization will center on agency politics rather than legislative politics, a matter of some significance for those seeking to understand the overall process of regime formation.49 This is also an appropriate point to add a few comments on the transition from operationalization to day-to-day operation from a domestic perspective.50 Once the provisions of an international regime have passed into the domestic practice of the members, the process of regime formation is over. There may be all sorts of bureaucratic politics among those agencies (such as the Environmental Protection Agency; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the Department of Transportation; and several units of the Department of the Interior, in the case of U.S. participation in the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy) charged with implementing the provisions of a regime. Similarly, responsible agencies may experiment with a variety of policy instruments in the course of carrying out their obligations under the terms of a regime. But these are clearly matters that belong to the domain of regime operation. Although it is undoubtedly pointless to insist on a rigid point of demarcation between operationalization and operation, the focus of the internal component of the final stage of regime formation is on the transition from the signing of a convention, treaty, or ministerial declaration to the establishment of a practice that has some substance within member states.51 The political dynamic of this final stage of regime formation is bifurcated. On the one hand, it involves domestic efforts to ratify treaties, pass implementing legislation, assign responsibility for implementation, and initiate programs to carry out the actual work of operating a regime. The nature of these efforts will obviously vary from country to country. Partly, this is a matter of differences among the political systems of individual member countries. We cannot assume, for example, that the operationalization of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy followed parallel paths in 49. Oran R. Young, "Public Policy and Natural Resources: Choosing Human/Nature Relationships," Rockefeller Occasional Paper #2, Dartmouth College, 1993. 50. In contrast to the other stages of regime formation, the operationalization stage has no obvious end point. There is an element of arbitrariness in any procedure for specifying the end of regime formation and the beginning of regime operation. For purposes of this analysis, however, I will conclude at the point where existing domestic and international agencies have accepted responsibility for implementation or new agencies have been created to handle this task. 51. Ronald B. Mitchell, International Oil Pollution at Sea: Environmental Policy and Treaty Compliance, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.

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Russia and the United States, or even in Canada and the United States. In part, it is a matter of the importance that different countries attach to regimes. There is no comparison between the efforts of Norway and Sweden on behalf of the regime for the Barents Region, for instance, although they are both members of the arrangement in good standing. At the same time, the political dynamic of operationalization encompasses international efforts to agree on the creation of policymaking bodies (e.g., the Barents Euro-Arctic Council) and administrative mechanisms (e.g., AMAP). This process is distinct from the institutional bargaining of the negotiation stage, both because it typically involves representatives of line agencies as well as foreign ministry personnel and because it centers on the commitment of material resources, including personnel, in addition to financial support and is not concerned with working out the language of constitutive contracts. Those involved in this process often have different incentives than those who handle the negotiation stage, and the material resources needed to operationalize a regime may be hard to come by, even when those charged with setting up a Barents Euro-Arctic Council or an AMAP have the best intentions in the world. The Stages of Regime Formation Compared If the preceding account is correct, what differences among the stages of regime formation should we expect to encounter in examining actual cases? This section spells out a number of analytically derived expectations about differences in the political dynamics of the three stages that should show up in the empirical record of the cases. They are, in effect, hypotheses to be compared with the processes of regime formation occurring in connection with the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region. Such a study can be thought of as a natural experiment in the sense that it deals with processes in which variance on the analytic dimension, labeled stage of regime formation, is coupled with continuity or little change on other dimensions. This makes it reasonable to attribute differences in the political dynamics of the various stages of regime formation occurring in these cases to the effects of moving from one stage to another. For ease of exposition, I discuss these expected differences under the following headings: driving forces, players, collective-action problems, context, tactics, and design perspectives. Table 1.1, which seeks to capture the differences in the form of simple hypotheses, should prove helpful as a handy reference for readers of the case studies presented in Chapters 3 through 5.

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Table 1.1 Hypotheses relating to the stages of regime formation 1. Driving Forces

Ideas are particularly prominent during agenda formation; interests dominate the stage of negotiation; material conditions become increasingly significant in connection with the shift from paper to practice.

2. Players

There are no simple shifts from one stage of regime formation to another in the roles organizations play. With regard to individuals, however, intellectual leadership is particularly prominent during agenda formation, entrepreneurial leadership looms large during the stage of negotiation, and structural leadership is important throughout the process.

3. Collective-Action Problems

While stalemate or gridlock is the classic collective-action problem of the negotiation stage, miscommunication is the standard pitfall of agenda formation, and asymmetries in levels of effort are the typical hazard of operationalization.

4. Context

Broad changes in the political environment affect agenda formation; more specific exogenous events influence negotiations, and domestic constraints loom large during operationalization.

5. Tactics

The classic concern with threats and promises is most pronounced during the negotiation stage. Efforts to influence the framing of the problem are characteristic of agenda formation, and the tactics of administrative or bureaucratic politics come to the fore during operationalization.

6. Design Perspectives

Agenda formation is a time for focusing on the big picture; negotiation stimulates a concern for language to be included in agreements, and operationalization leads to a focus on domestic concerns to the detriment of efforts to set up the relevant international machinery.

Driving Forces The existing literature on regime formation is characterized by a debate among those who point to material conditions (especially power in the structural sense), interests, and ideas as the principal determinants of the process.52 In effect, these arguments reflect differences in judgments regarding the relative importance to the process of regime formation of different social driving forces. Differentiating among the stages of regime formation makes it possible to resolve at least part of this debate. Thus, the stage of agenda formation with its openness and its emphasis on the framing of issues involves a process in which the cognitive forces central to ideabased arguments come into play with particular force. Whether or not this means epistemic communities hold the key to agenda formation is much 52. Young and Osherenko, eds., Polar Politics.

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less clear.53 As it turns out, public officials, including career bureaucrats, may play key roles in developing and articulating the new visions that sometimes surface in the stage of agenda formation. The negotiation stage, by contrast, is dominated by interactions among clearly identified and selfinterested players seeking to craft agreements whose provisions are congenial to their own interests. This does not mean that the players are all unitary actors or that their interests are always in conflict—far from it. Still, there is no mistaking the negotiation stage as a process of institutional bargaining in which the usual forces at work in such interactions become prominent.54 For its part, the operationalization of agreements setting out the provisions of regimes almost always involves allocations of material resources and the exercise of power required to make such allocations stick. Persuading legislatures to ratify agreements and, especially, commanding administrators to devote resources to making something happen requires executive action. In politics, it is hard to get something for nothing, and this means that the exercise of power as a means of establishing priorities and commanding subordinates to follow them will always loom large in transforming the provisions of an international regime from paper to practice. Players It is tempting to jump from this account of driving forces to the conclusion that nonstate actors will have particularly prominent roles to play in the agenda formation stage of regime formation and that states will take center stage in the stages to follow. But this interpretation is not persuasive, and for at least three reasons. There are cases in which the vision and the political energy needed to move an issue through the process of agenda formation comes largely from public policymakers themselves; the Barents Euro-Arctic Region is a case in point. On the other hand, various subnational units of government and nonstate actors are increasingly demanding and obtaining meaningful access to the negotiation stage of regime formation; the cases explored in this study illustrate this point too.55 Beyond this, it would be a mistake to overlook the role of nonstate actors as sources of pressure on the administrative agencies responsible for the operationalization stage. Although we often think of such actors as pressuring reluctant administrators to live up to the requirements of international 53. Peter M. Haas, "Epistemic Communities and the Dynamics of International Environmental Cooperation," in Rittberger, ed., Regime Theory and International Relations, 168-201. 54. Young, International Governance, chap. 4. 55. Tennberg, "Environmental Cooperation."

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agreements, there are of course also cases in which such actors seek to slow down or derail the process of operationalization. When we come to the roles individuals play as leaders in the process of regime formation, however, clear differences appear among the three stages.56 Agenda formation calls for intellectual leadership to frame issues, to present them in ways that capture the imagination of attentive publics, and to bring the weight of the scientific community and other groups of experts to bear in persuading policymakers of the importance of the issues at stake. The process of negotiation, on the other hand, is the domain of the political entrepreneur par excellence. It is at this stage that the skills of individuals who can add and subtract issues to facilitate the bargaining process, craft the terms of negotiating texts, and broker the deals needed to achieve consensus often spell the difference between success and failure in reaching closure on the terms of a convention, treaty, or ministerial declaration setting forth the constitutive provisions of a regime.57 For its part, structural leadership may surface during any of the stages of regime formation. The initiatives of those who can bring the material resources of a state to bear on the process may become important in moving an issue to the top of the international political agenda, in providing the side payments needed to gain acceptance of the terms of a central agreement, or in mustering the resources needed to get administrators within members states to take the provisions of a new regime seriously. Collective-Action Problems International regimes are born out of a concern with collective-action problems that can lead to joint losses or to the obstruction of efforts to reap joint gains.58 But the process of regime formation itself is also fraught with collective-action problems that can slow down or even derail the efforts of those seeking to put effective institutional arrangements in place at the international level. What is notable in the context of this discussion is that the nature of typical collective-action problems differs from one stage of the process of regime formation to another. Those engaged in agenda formation are apt to misunderstand or even talk past each other because they are operating with different visions of the problem in mind. If some participants see long-range air pollution as a problem of transboundary 56. Young, "Political Leadership." 57. James K. Sebenius, "Negotiation Arithmetic: Adding and Subtracting Issues and Parties," International Organization 37 (Spring 1983): 281-316. 58. Russell Hardin, Collective Action, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982; and Oran R. Young, International Cooperation: Building Regimes for Natural Resources and the Environment, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.

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externalities while others regard it as a matter of competing uses of an international commons, for example, it will be hard to move beyond agenda formation to initiate meaningful negotiations. The typical collectiveaction problem of the negotiation stage, by contrast, is the classic danger of stalemate or gridlock.59 That is, the participants may become so committed to incompatible negotiating texts that they cannot reach closure on the terms of a mutually acceptable agreement, even though doing so would produce benefits for all.60 When it comes to operationalization, the central collective-action problem involves the danger of significant asymmetries in the efforts of individual members to move from paper to practice. In extreme cases, like the Covenant of the League of Nations, one or more of the key members may fail to ratify the agreement and, as a result, refuse to become active members of the regime. But short of this, there are many cases in which there is great variation in the capacity of individual members to incorporate the provisions of regimes into their own political practices or in the willingness of members to provide support for the international administrative apparatus set up to operate a regime. Context The role of context is also a matter that can be expected to vary from one stage of regime formation to another. During the stage of agenda formation, broad shifts in the overarching political environment are apt to be important in getting an issue onto the international political agenda and moving it up the scale of priorities. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the expansion of the European Union certainly played a role in directing attention to the Barents Region. Much the same is true in the case of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, where the rise of the environmental movement combined with the end of the Cold War to open opportunities. During the negotiation stage, by contrast, much more specific exogenous events are apt to energize or impede the process of institutional bargaining. The impact of the announcement of the ozone hole in the case of stratospheric ozone is often mentioned in this connection. The dissemination of information regarding transboundary fluxes of sulfur dioxide in northern Europe certainly made a difference in moving forward negotiations leading to the signing of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy. Domestic developments (e.g., elections, economic trends), on the other hand, can be expected to loom large as contextual factors affecting the operationalization 59. Eugene B. Skolnikoff, "The Policy Gridlock on Global Warming," Foreign Policy 79 (1990): 77-93. 60. Schelling, Strategy of Conflict.

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stage of regime formation. To cite some prominent non-Arctic examples, the shift from the Bush administration to the Clinton administration led quickly to the signing of the Convention on Biological Diversity by the United States—a step President Bush had pointedly refused to take in 1992—and subsequently to a search for ways to remove obstacles to implementing the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea, an approach Presidents Reagan and Bush had both opposed. Tactics There are differences among the stages of regime formation in the realm of tactics as well. Tactics often referred to in accounts of regime formation—including the role of credible commitments, the use of threats and promises, and the need for a certain element of secrecy (or at least privacy) in hammering out the provisions of negotiating texts—are relevant primarily to the stage of negotiation.61 They have little relevance to agenda formation and operationalization. Agenda formation, for its part, is a more open-ended process involving efforts to define the basic nature of the problem and to convince attentive publics of its importance. The tactics appropriate to this stage center on the formulation of authoritative (though not necessarily detailed) statements regarding the character of the problem and on the collection of endorsements from a variety of interest groups in both domestic and international arenas. The tactics of the operationalization stage are the familiar tactics of legislative politics and, especially, administrative politics. In the two cases under consideration in this book, neither of which required ratification or implementing legislation, the emphasis naturally falls on the tactics associated with bureaucratic politics as a key to understanding the political dynamic of the operationalization process.62 Design Perspectives Finally, this account leads us to expect differences in the design perspectives informing the activities of participants in the different stages of regime formation. The agenda formation stage is one of spelling out a generative vision and garnering endorsements, or at least tacit support, from a wide range of political constituencies. It would serve no purpose at this stage to present a detailed blueprint of the institutional arrangement to be created. 61. Debra Spar, The Cooperative Edge: The Internal Politics of International Cartels, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. 62. Graham Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.

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In fact, this could well prove detrimental to the cause by providing skeptics or potential opponents with concrete issues on which to focus. Design perspectives during the negotiation stage, by contrast, are shaped by the fact that the bargaining process almost always eventuates in deals that draw on a number of different proposals and amalgamates them into packages that are politically acceptable to all those at the negotiating table. Knowing this, those interested in institutional design can be expected to focus on what they see as essential to their conception of the ensuing social practice and not to worry about a range of secondary issues of the sort that would be covered in a more complete blueprint.63 Institutional design is a political process rather than a technical exercise; those who ignore this fact preside over institutional failures again and again. When it comes to operationalization, design perspectives fragment into a multiplicity of largely unrelated elements. There are, in some cases, requirements for establishing international organizations to administer regimes (e.g., AMAP), and parties exhausted by the effort to reach closure on the terms of a formative agreement frequently fail to devote sufficient time and energy to the design of these arrangements. For its part, operationalization in domestic arenas of individual regime members does not lend itself to generalizing about design perspectives. This is a function of variations in both political structures and policy cultures among the members of most regimes. Whereas some regime members may be attracted to the use of incentive-compatible policy instruments drawn from the analytic framework of neoclassical microeconomics, for instance, command-and-control regulations will look more attractive to others.64 From an international point of view, the ultimate concern is the formation of regimes that are able to solve the problems that motivate their creators to establish them in the first place.65 The domestic procedures used by individual members to live up to their obligations under the terms of a regime are generally left to those possessing expertise regarding the inner workings of each of the relevant political systems. Reflecting on these analytically derived expectations reminds us that the argument of this study is, in some respects, a modest one. It does not constitute a full-blown theory of regime formation capable of explaining 63. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 64. R. W. Hahn and R. N. Stavins, "Market Based Environmental Regulation," Ecology Law Quarterly 18 (1991): 1-42. 65. Oran R. Young, "The Effectiveness of International Institutions: Hard Cases and Critical Variables," in James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel, eds., Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 160-94.

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whether and when regimes will form and the substantive content of those that do form. Rather, the argument simply says that the political dynamics of the three stages—agenda formation, negotiation, and operationalization—differ from one another in predictable ways that make it difficult, often impossible, to formulate valid generalizations applying to the entire process of regime formation. Modest as it is, however, the implications of this argument for students of international institutions are far-reaching. If the argument proves correct, it will mean that all past efforts to explain the process of regime formation or to reconstruct the creation stories of specific regimes will have to be reexamined to determine whether they are compatible with the dynamics of each of the three stages of regime formation. To understand what happens in many real-world cases, it will prove necessary to formulate different explanations to account for the outcomes of each stage of the process. The Shape of Things to Come Chapter 2, entitled "International Cooperation in the Arctic," introduces the Circumpolar North as a setting for the development of institutionalized forms of international cooperation and provides descriptive accounts of the two cases analyzed in-depth in this study: the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region. Unlike Antarctica, its southern counterpart, which has been the scene of a generally successful and continuously evolving international regime for over three decades,66 the Arctic has been dismissed by most observers as an unlikely environment in which to pursue the goal of sustained international cooperation. Recently, however, this situation has changed dramatically. Today, the Arctic is a focus of attention for many states and nonstate actors interested in launching cooperative practices in a range of substantive areas, including economic development, environmental protection, scientific research, and cultural survival. The latest development centers on the creation of the Arctic Council. Established formally through the signing of a ministerial Declaration of the Establishment of the Arctic Council in September 1996, the council has a mandate to consider a wide range of public issues pertaining to the Arctic. Needless to say, it is impossible to predict with any confidence whether the long-term consequences of this sequence of events will take the form of a proliferation of functionally specific arrangements, the emergence of an integrated Arctic regime encompassing a range of functional areas, or, 66. Stokke and Vidas, eds., Governing the Antarctic.

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alternatively, a series of disparate initiatives that ultimately prove disappointing. But, in any event, the specific initiatives we know as the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region have unfolded during the 1990s in a broader Arctic setting in which interest in cooperative initiatives that are international and multilateral in scope has been on the rise. Chapters 3 through 5 take up the three stages of the process of regime formation. Each chapter contains an extended discussion of the two cases as well as some observations pertaining to similarities and differences between the cases with regard to the stage of regime formation in question. Chapter 3 is entitled "Agenda Formation: The Finnish Initiative and the Norwegian Initiative" in recognition of Finland's role in bringing problems of environmental protection to the attention of the Arctic states and of Norway's role in drawing attention to the shifting political circumstances of the northernmost segment of Europe. Chapter 4 picks up the story of the negotiation stage in the formation of the two regimes. This chapter's title—"Negotiation: The Roads to Rovaniemi and to Kirkenes"—reflects the facts that the ministerial declaration adopting the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy was signed in Rovaniemi, Finland, and the analogous declaration launching the Barents Euro-Arctic Region was signed in Kirkenes, Norway. The story of the operationalization stage of regime formation for these cases is the subject of Chapter 5, "Operationalization: Activating the AEPS and the BEAR." This chapter describes what happened after the ministers left Rovaniemi and Kirkenes and evaluates the results in terms of the analytically derived expectations about this stage discussed in the preceding section of the present chapter. Chapter 6—"Comparing the Stages of Regime Formation"—draws together and assesses the overall results of the project. Given both the nature of the issues at stake and the scope of the project, the conclusions do not prove anything definitive about the process of regime formation in international society. Yet they are highly suggestive, lending substance to my opening claim regarding the need to differentiate among the principal stages of regime formation in order both to provide a convincing explanation of specific instances of regime formation and to construct a satisfactory theory of regime formation as a recurrent phenomenon in international society. In the wake of this analysis, the theoretically inclined would be illadvised to overlook the distinctive political dynamic associated with each stage of the process of regime formation. For their part, policymakers and others with roles to play in specific cases of regime formation would do well to tailor their initiatives so as to maximize their suitability to the stage of the process in which they are launched.

CHAPTER

TWO

International Cooperation in the Arctic

T

here is nothing sacred about the Arctic as a setting in which to explore the fit between theoretically derived expectations regarding the process of regime formation and the process as it occurs in real-world settings. Yet this region has considerable appeal in a study of regime formation for reasons that are worth highlighting. As a consequence of the Cold War, throughout most of the postwar era the region was bifurcated, used as an important deployment zone for strategic weapons systems, and treated by a number of states as a major source of raw materials. Consequently, the Circumpolar North will strike many students of international cooperation as a hard case in which the prospects for developing effective international and especially multilateral institutions are marginal at best.1 It is all the more striking, therefore, that the Arctic has become the scene, over the last decade or so, of a gathering movement toward international cooperation in a variety of issue areas. Already, this movement has borne considerable fruit, including creation of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region; there is every indication that additional developments involving multilateral institutions in the circumpolar world will occur during the decade to come.2 This chapter begins with a brief introduction to the recent history of Arctic international relations. This introduction provides a context for the more detailed accounts of the cases that follow; it does not aim to set forth a comprehensive account of the rise of the Arctic as a distinct region in international society.3 Descriptions of the principal features of the Arctic 1. On the use of hard cases as a research tool, see Young, "Effectiveness of International Institutions." 2. To these observations I would add, on a more personal note, that I have been a close observer of and an occasional player in this recent transition in the character of Arctic international relations. Although I am fundamentally an academic rather than a practitioner, these experiences have put me in a position to address the subject of regime formation in the Arctic with a level of insight that is difficult for students of international relations to acquire in the normal course of events. 3. On the forces working for and against the emergence of the Arctic as a distinctive region, see Oran R. Young, Arctic Politics: Conflict and Cooperation in the Circumpolar North, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992, chap. 12. The idea of the Arc-

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Environmental Protection Strategy and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region follow. (The texts of the Rovaniemi Declaration of 1991, the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, and the Kirkenes Declaration of 1993 are included as appendices to this study.) These descriptions are meant to convey baseline information about the two cases rather than to answer questions about the dynamics of the process of regime formation. Readers may want to refer back to these descriptions as they consider the arguments about the different stages of regime formation articulated in subsequent chapters. The chapter closes with some comments on current and probable future developments in Arctic international relations. Among other things, these comments raise questions about the balance between the creation of pan-Arctic regimes, like the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, and subregional arrangements, like the Barents Euro-Arctic Region, and about the prospects for the emergence of a multipurpose Arctic regime, reminiscent of the Antarctic Treaty System, during the foreseeable future. The Arctic in World Affairs Interestingly, there is a history of innovative experiments with regime formation in the Arctic stretching back to the beginning of this century. The four-nation Treaty for the Preservation and Protection of Fur Seals, signed in 1911 as the culmination of a complex process spanning several decades, created an international regime that proved highly successful in rebuilding the population of fur seals breeding on the Commander and Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea and that was long regarded as a model in efforts to deal with problems of wildlife management at the international level.4 The Treaty of Spitsbergen, signed in 1920 as an element of the peace settlement following World War I, created an international regime for the Svalbard Archipelago that remains in force today.5 In its provisions for demilitarizing the archipelago and addressing sensitive issues relating to sovereignty, tic as a political region is developed in Franklyn Griffiths, "Introduction: The Arctic as an International Political Region," in Kari Mottola, ed., The Arctic Challenge: Nordic and Canadian Approaches to Security and Cooperation in an Emerging International Region, Boulder: Westview Press, 1988, 1-14. 4. James Thomas Gay, American Fur Seal Diplomacy: The Alaskan Fur Seal Controversy, New York: Peter Lang, 1987; Natalia S. Mirovitskaya, Margaret Clark, and Ronald G. Purver, "North Pacific Fur Seals: Regime Formation as a Means of Resolving Conflict," in Young and Osherenko, eds., Polar Politics, 22-55; and Simon Lyster, International Wildlife Law, Cambridge: Grotius Publications, 1985, chap. 3. 5. Willy 0streng, Politics in High Latitudes: The Svalbard Archipelago, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1978; and Ellen Singh and Artemy Saguirian, "The Svalbard Archipelago: The Role of Surrogate Negotiators," in Young and Osherenko, eds., Polar Politics, 56-95.

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this regime has provided a model for more recent arrangements, including the regime for the south polar region set forth in the Antarctic Treaty of 1959. More recently, the five range states—Canada, Denmark/Greenland, Norway, the Soviet Union (now Russia), and the United States—succeeded in forming a multilateral regime to protect polar bears under the provisions of the 1973 Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears.6 This arrangement, which is generally regarded as an important force in ensuring the welfare of polar bear stocks throughout the Circumpolar North, is particularly noteworthy because it was set up during the era of the Cold War.7 Throughout most of the recent past, however, the Arctic has not offered fertile ground for those interested in creating international regimes, for two distinct reasons. The barriers associated with the Cold War are generally well known. The East-West confrontation effectively split the Arctic into two opposing camps, with the Soviet Union, controlling about half of the region, on one side and the United States, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, and Norway linked as allies within NATO on the other. What is more, the Arctic emerged during several phases of the Cold War as an arena for the deployment of nuclear-powered submarines carrying strategic weapons and manned bombers equipped with long-range cruise missiles—a fact that gave the region a high profile as a factor in the global strategic balance.8 With few exceptions—in particular the 1973 polar bear agreement—efforts to launch regional initiatives aimed at the creation of international regimes could not flourish in this environment. For the most part, no one even tried to pursue such objectives. The other, somewhat less obvious, impediment to international cooperation in the Arctic arose from the predominance of core/periphery relations in the region.9 With the exception of Iceland, the land and natural resources located in the Circumpolar North are sparsely populated hinterlands of advanced industrial societies whose metropoles lie well to the south. Thus, Alaska is affected by policies articulated in Washington; Greenland by policies set in Copenhagen; the North Calotte by policies 6. Fikkan, Osherenko, and Arikainen, "Polar Bears"; and Ian Stirling, Polar Bears, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988. 7. Lyster, International Wildlife Law, chap. 3; and Pal Prestrud and Ian Stirling, "The International Polar Bear Agreement and the Current Status of Polar Bear Conservation," Aquatic Mammals 20 (1994): 113-24. 8. Gail Osherenko and Oran R. Young, The Age of the Arctic: Hot Conflicts and Cold Realities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, chap. 2. 9. Mel Watkins, ed., Dene Nation: The Colony Within, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977; and John S. Dryzek and Oran R. Young, "Internal Colonialism or Self-Sufficiency? Problems and Prospects in the Circumpolar North," in Robert S. Merrill and Dorothy Willner, eds., Conflict and the Common Good, publication no. 24 in Studies in Third World Societies, Williamsburg: College of William and Mary, 1983, 115-34.

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established in Helsinki, Oslo, and Stockholm; and the Russian North by policies devised in Moscow. Given this situation, coupled with the attractions of Arctic lands as relatively secure sources of valuable raw materials, including world-class reserves of oil and natural gas, it is hardly surprising that political relationships in the Far North have long run along North/ South lines and that international relations have constituted a secondary concern throughout much of the Arctic. What is remarkable is the extremes to which this pattern has gone in many areas. It is striking, for instance, that those wishing to travel from Fairbanks to Yellowknife must still go south as far as Seattle and that those desiring to travel from North America to Greenland generally find it necessary to go by way of Copenhagen. Sometime during the 1980s, these impediments to international cooperation in the Arctic began to erode; over the last few years the pace of this development has accelerated markedly.10 Many factors have contributed to this turn of events. Among the most striking occurrences are surely the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War—a combination of events that has now resulted in the virtual elimination of barriers to the movement of people as well as goods and ideas between the two halves of the Arctic. But other factors, including the devolution of political authority from central to regional governments and the extraordinary growth of transnational contacts among the Arctic's indigenous peoples, have contributed to this development as well. It is undoubtedly pointless to treat any specific event as a causally significant occurrence in a process of this sort. Nonetheless, the remarkable speech concerning international cooperation in the Arctic that Mikhail Gorbachev delivered in Murmansk on 1 October 1987 has been viewed by many as a symbolic turning point in the shift to a new pattern of international relations in the Circumpolar North.11 In this speech, Gorbachev set forth a multidimensional program of cooperative initiatives in the North, including one or more nuclear-free zones, restrictions on naval activities in the North, peaceful cooperation in the development of Arctic resources, the coordination of scientific research, cooperation in protecting the Arctic's environment, the opening of the Northern Sea Route to international shipping, and the recognition of the rights of the indigenous peoples of the region. Gorbachev also called on all those interested in the region to join forces in forming in the Arctic "a genuine zone of peace and fruitful cooperation."

10. Oran R. Young, "The Arctic in World Affairs," The McKernan Lectures, Washington Sea Grant Program, Seattle: University of Washington, 1989. 11. The full text of Gorbachev's speech in English can be found in "The North: A Zone of Peace," Ottawa: Press Office of the USSR Embassy, 1988.

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33

Even before the Murmansk speech, several pairs of Arctic countries had taken steps to devise bilateral arrangements dealing with a range of issues of mutual concern. Norway and the Soviet Union (now Russia) developed a cooperative arrangement for the fisheries of the Barents Sea in a series of agreements dating from 1976.12 Iceland and Norway formed a bilateral regime during 1980-81, not only settling their jurisdictional differences regarding the marine area around Jan Mayen but also establishing a joint fisheries commission and a joint development zone to provide a management system for hydrocarbon development in that area in the future.13 Canada and Denmark reached common ground in 1983 on the provisions of a Marine Environmental Cooperation Agreement covering the marine systems of the Davis Strait—Baffin Bay area and intended to prevent environmental disruption attributable to commercial shipping in that area. The United States and Canada signed an agreement in 1987 on a management system for the Porcupine caribou herd treated as a shared natural resource; the two countries worked out an Agreement on Arctic Cooperation in 1988 designed to resolve or at least to manage their differences regarding the use of the waters of the Northwest Passage.14 Nor has this proliferation of bilateral initiatives dampened the growth of interest in multilateral cooperative arrangements in the Arctic. The two cases examined in detail in this study, the Finnish Initiative aimed at a regionwide environmental protection agreement and the Norwegian Initiative aimed at a multipurpose agreement covering a more restricted portion of the Arctic, are distinctive cases in point. A somewhat similar case involves the creation of the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission (NAMMCO) by Iceland, Norway, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands— Canada, Japan, and Russia have attended meetings as observers—as a means of pursuing interests that have been ignored or rejected for a number of years within the institutional setting of the international regime for whales and whaling.15 Recently, the Canadians have taken the lead in advocating the establishment of an Arctic Council, an initiative culminating in the signing of a ministerial Declaration on the Establishment of the Arctic Council in Ottawa on 19 September 1996. Although the details remain to be spelled out, the council is intended to function as an organization 12. Olav Schram Stokke and Alf Hakon Hoel, "Splitting the Gains: Political Economy of the Barents Sea Fisheries," Conflict and Cooperation 29 (1991): 49-65. 13. Elliot L. Richardson, "Jan Mayen in Perspective," American journal of International Law 82 (July 1988): 443-58. 14. Donald R. Rothwell, "The Canadian-U.S. Northwest Passage Dispute: A Reassessment," Cornell International Law Journal 26 (Spring 1993): 331-72. 15. Alf Hakon Hoel, "Regionalization of International Whale Management: The Case of the North Atlantic Marine Mammals Commission," Arctic 46 (June 1993): 116-23.

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(as opposed to a set of roles, rules, and relationships) interested in a variety of regionwide issues in the Circumpolar North that pays particular attention to finding creative ways to provide nonstate actors and especially the region's indigenous peoples with a meaningful voice in Arctic affairs.16 It is worth noting here as well that the establishment of several broader, even global, regimes have particular significance for the Arctic. This is true of the regime for the protection of stratospheric ozone, since there is a significant seasonal ozone "hole" over the Arctic as well as the Antarctic.17 Similarly, the emergence of a climate regime is important from the perspective of the Arctic, since temperature increases caused by the greenhouse effect are expected to be up to twice as large in the high latitudes, and especially the north polar region, as they are in the mid-latitudes.18 Another interesting feature of the new wave of international cooperation in the Arctic is the emergence of several arrangements whose members are subnational units of government or other nonstate actors. The Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC), an organization founded in 1977 to represent the common interests of the Inuit located in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, and the Russian Far East, not only has flourished but also has provided a base for efforts to create an Arctic Leaders' Summit linking the ICC with the Saami Council and the more recently established Association of Indigenous Minorities of the North, Siberia and the Far East of the Russian Federation.19 In 1990, representatives of the eight Arctic states succeeded in launching the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC), a hybrid arrangement that is largely nongovernmental in nature but that also includes a Regional Board whose members are responsible for ensuring that lASC's activities are compatible with the interests of the Arctic states.20 IASC, which now has scientific organizing committees located in seventeen 16. Arctic Council Panel, To Establish an International Arctic Council: A Framework Report, Ottawa: Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, 1991. 17. Although the Arctic ozone hole is not as dramatic as its southern counterpart, the presence of sizable communities in the north polar region means that its impact on human health may exceed that of the Antarctic ozone hole. See International Arctic Science Committee, Effects of Increased Ultraviolet Radiation in the Arctic: An Interdisciplinary Report on the State of Knowledge and Research Needed, IASC Report No. 2, 1995. 18. Barrie Maxwell, "Atmospheric and Climatic Conditions in the Canadian Arctic: Causes, Effects, and Impacts," Northern Perspectives 15 (December 1987): 2-6. 19. International Working Group on Indigenous Affairs, Indigenous Peoples of the Soviet North, Copenhagen: IWGIA Document 67, 1990; and Mads Faegteborg, Towards an International Indigenous Arctic Policy, Copenhagen: Arctic Information Forlag, 1993. 20. E. F. Roots, "Co-operation in Arctic Science: Background and Requirements," in Franklyn Griffiths, ed., Arctic Alternatives: Civility or Militarism in the Circumpolar North, Toronto: Science for Peace/Samuel Stevens, 1992, 136-55. Given lASC's hybrid nature, some would describe it as a quasi-nongovernmental organization or QUANGO rather than an ordinary NGO.

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35

countries, shows increasing signs of becoming an effective counterpart to the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), which has evolved over time into an important player in the affairs of the south polar region.21 There is, as well, the Northern Forum—an organization made up of subnational units of government (that is, counties, states, territories, autonomous regions, oblasts, and so forth) located throughout the Circumpolar North, including the northernmost areas of China, Japan, and Mongolia as well as the usual Arctic states. What unites these entities is not only the need to meet the challenges of similar biological and physical settings but also the sense that they are northern peripheries whose interests are poorly understood and underrepresented in the policymaking processes of national governments.22 It is too early to tell how successful this initiative will be. But it is of distinct interest as an illustration of the growing efforts of subnational units of government all over the world to engage in international relations on their own.23 The Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) Meeting in Rovaniemi, Finland, representatives of the eight Arctic states signed a Declaration on the Protection of the Arctic Environment on 14 June 1991 (the full text is reprinted as Appendix A).24 The Rovaniemi Declaration is often characterized as the Finnish Initiative due to the vigorous backing of Finland and, more specifically, senior officials in the Finnish For eign Ministry coupled with the entrepreneurial activities of Esko Rajakoski, the Foreign Ministry official who spearheaded the drive to persuade others to join in creating this arrangement. The Rovaniemi Declaration commits its signatories to set in motion a series of activities (known collectively as the AEPS or the Rovaniemi process) intended both to broaden and deepen understanding of transboundary environmental concerns arising in the Arctic and to enhance joint capabilities to deal with these environmental con cerns. A second document, referred to explicitly in the declaration and 21. For several perspectives on the role of SCAR, see Polar Research Board, Antarctic Treaty System: An Assessment, Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1986. 22. Oran R. Young, "The Age of the Arctic—Mechanisms for Circumpolar Cooperation," in Proceedings of the Conference on New Perspectives on the Arctic: The Changing Role of the United States in the Circumpolar North, Fairbanks: University of Alaska, 1992, 141-47. 23. For a general account of this development, see Brian Hocking, Localizing Foreign Policy: Non-Central Governments and Multilayered Diplomacy, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. 24. Burhenne, ed., International Environmental Soft Law, 991-4504-4506.

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issued simultaneously as the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (excerpts are reprinted as Appendix B), provides an initial account of the principal environmental issues addressed by this arrangement under the rubric of "problems and priorities" and commits the signatories to pursuing a number of action plans designed to deal with these issues. The Rovaniemi process is circumpolar or pan-Arctic in scope. Although the founding documents do not make a point of defining the Arctic in any explicit way, it is clear not only that they apply to the whole of the Circumpolar North but also that they envision joint actions as well as coordinated efforts on the part of the individual signatories within their own jurisdictions.25 The strategy notes, for example, "that the pollution problems of today do not respect political boundaries and that no state alone will be able to act effectively against environmental threats to the Arctic." With regard to functional scope, there is a certain duality in the provisions of this regime. The AEPS speaks somewhat expansively of the role of the Arctic in global systems, the importance of sustainable development in the Arctic, and the needs of the region's indigenous peoples. But when it comes to specifying priorities, it is clear that the primary focus of the strategy is a set of specific pollutants thought to constitute serious threats to Arctic ecosystems. Among those listed are chlorinated organic contaminants, oil pollution, heavy metals, underwater noise, radioactivity, and acidification. This orientation is explainable, at least in part, as a function of Finnish concern with transboundary fluxes of acid precipitation originating in the Kola Peninsula and impacting the forests of northern Finland, North American concerns about the environmental consequences of the production and transportation of oil under northern conditions, and the general concern about radioactive contamination in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident. The opening sentence of the Rovaniemi Declaration begins, "We, the Representatives of the Governments" of the eight Arctic states. Accordingly, there can be no doubt about the identity of the participants in the regime established in June 1991. Yet several points regarding membership are worthy of additional comment. To begin with, this regime both reflects and strengthens the idea of the Arctic Eight as a politically meaningful and effective grouping of states in international society. Given the recent history of the Arctic as a region divided by the Cold War into a group of NATO allies, the Soviet Union, and a pair of neutrals (Finland and Sweden), the speed with which the idea of the Arctic Eight has caught 25. States can coordinate their actions in the sense that they agree to follow a common set of rules within their individual jurisdictions, without initiating joint programs. The AEPS places clear emphasis on joint programs.

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on as a politically potent concept is remarkable. The emphasis on the Arctic Eight as the members of the regime is notable, as well, in light of the fact that some of the pollutants of concern in this context originate not only beyond the geographical confines of the Arctic but also within the jurisdictions of states that are not members of the regime. Additionally, although the formal members of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy are all states, the role of nonstate actors became an issue of considerable importance in the process of forming this regime. The founding documents themselves speak of the special concerns of indigenous peoples, and groups representing these peoples were present at a number of the preparatory meetings leading to the signing of the Rovaniemi Declaration. But the issue of the role of nonstate actors grew more complex as the terms of the AEPS evolved, initially with an expression of interest on the part of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe and subsequently with rising interest on the part of a number of environmental advocacy groups.26 Faced with the problem of accommodating the concerns of a growing array of nonstate actors, representatives of the Arctic Eight made some gestures toward opening the process to these groups but fell back in the end on the conventional wisdom of restricting membership in the regime to states. As I observed in Chapter 1, the Declaration on the Protection of the Arctic Environment and the accompanying Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy belong to the category of what is generally described as soft law. Although these documents speak in terms of specific agreements and commitments on a number of points, they did not require ratification or implementing legislation to go into effect within member countries. This made it possible to proceed quickly with initial efforts to operationalize the AEPS, but it left the regime without any legislative basis to be used in justifying or defending the commitment of material resources to the pursuit of the regime's goals. It also means that efforts to assess progress made under the terms of the regime must focus largely on the activities of administrative agencies that assume responsibility for making good on the commitments embedded in the regime's founding documents, whether or not they receive any additional resources for this purpose. In the case of the United States, for example, this responsibility is shared by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Coast Guard, and several agencies located within the Department of the Interior. The EPA, in particular, has tended to regard this effort as a low priority, expendable during periods of fiscal stress. 26. Tennberg, "Environmental Cooperation," 70-87.

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The Rovaniemi process is shaped, in large measure, by the way in which it frames the problem of environmental protection in the Arctic. The preambular language included in both documents speaks of Arctic ecosystems, sustainable development, and global environmental linkages. But in reality, the regime is just as notable for what it leaves out as for what it includes. There is no emphasis, for example, on specific global linkages, such as the effects of ozone depletion on Arctic systems or the role of the Arctic in climate change, a fact that underlines the extent to which this is an Arctic regime addressing regional issues of concern to the Arctic states. Perhaps this explains, at least in part, the initial reluctance of the United States to participate in the Rovaniemi process. Even more striking is the absence of any explicit effort to address the problem of Arctic haze. Arguably the most important long-range pollution problem that is Arcticspecific in character, Arctic haze involves the spread of airborne particulates originating largely in Eurasia over a large portion of the Arctic Basin on a seasonal basis. Identified initially during the 1950s, Arctic haze at its worst can produce seasonal air quality problems off Point Barrow, Alaska, that rival those of the Los Angeles area.27 Taking a leaf from the early experience of the Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP) Regime for Europe, the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy focuses on the behavior of specific pollutants, seeking to map their presence in the circumarctic region and to identify the pathways through which they reach the Arctic.28 Understandable as this approach is, it does not direct attention toward illuminating the complexities of large marine and large terrestrial ecosystems in the high latitudes, toward analyzing the interaction effects caused by a number of pollutants entering these systems at once, and toward assessing critical loads from a systemic point of view.29 It would be incorrect to overemphasize these omissions. The strategy does address other issues (for example, the conservation of Arctic flora and fauna) and has served as a stimulus for those seeking to understand the behavior of the Arctic's marine and terrestrial systems in holistic terms. Nonetheless, this regime is strongly marked by the mindset of its creators, a mindset reflecting European concerns about specific pollutants (e.g., sulfur dioxide, radionuclides) that originate within the jurisdiction of one country but proceed to cross international boundaries as airborne or waterborne particulates that cause damage to the natural environment or harm to human health in other countries. 27. Bernard Stonehouse, ed., Arctic Air Pollution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; and Soroos, "Arctic Haze and Transboundary Air Pollution," 186-222. 28. On LRTAP, consult Levy, "European Acid Rain," 73-132. 29. Kenneth Sherman, "Large Marine Ecosystems," in Encyclopedia of Earth System Science, vol. 2, New York: Academic Press, 1992, 653-73.

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To achieve its goals the Arctic environmental regime relies more on the launching of programmatic activities than on the articulation of regulative rules or prescriptions.30 Perhaps the most ambitious of these is the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP), which has a secretariat based in Norway and which is tasked with producing a State of the Arctic Environment Report (SOAER) and an accompanying scientific background document to be called the AMAP Assessment Report (AAR). Originally scheduled for completion in early 1996, these reports are now expected to be finished in 1997.31 Modeled on EMEP, a monitoring mechanism that has played a key role in the development of the European air pollution regime over the last two decades, AMAP is the most visible ele ment of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy in organizational terms. The work of the programme has been hampered by the need to rely on data sets collected for other purposes and not calibrated with each other and by a lack of adequate funding to rectify this problem. Yet the experience with LRTAP makes it clear that AMAP may contribute substantially to learning about the nature of the Arctic's environmental problems and, as a result, to the evolution of the regime.32 Several other programmatic activities launched by the regime are worthy of note as well, although they are not as highly developed as AMAP One is a Working Group on the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF). Spearheaded initially by the Canadians, this group has picked up steam with the passage of time and has now become a significant player on issues involving protected natural areas, the application of global initiatives regarding biodiversity to Arctic conditions, and the role of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK).33 Another program deals with Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response in the Arctic (EPPR). The obvious impetus behind this initiative is concern about the dangers of oil spills under Arctic conditions and a realization that such spills could prove even more difficult to deal with than the 1989 spill caused by the grounding of the Exxon Valdez in the subarctic setting of Alaska's Prince William Sound. Progress in this area has been affected by the economic and political turmoil afflicting Russia as well as by technological limitations on the capacity to handle oil spills under Arctic conditions. Even so, the group working on emergency preparedness has made real efforts to carry out its mandate. 30. For an account of international regimes that stresses regulative rules, see Abram Chayes and Antonia Handler Chayes, The New Sovereignty: Compliance with International Regulatory Agreements, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. 31. Elizabeth Leighton, "Fifth AMAP Working Group Meeting—Tromso, Norway, March 3-4, 1994," WWF Arctic Bulletin, no. 2, 1994, 4. 32. Levy, "European Acid Rain." 33. Jan-Peter Hubert Hansen, The State of Habitat Protection in the Arctic, CAFF Report No. 1, Trondheim: Directorate for Nature Management Norway, 1993.

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Yet another working group deals with Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment (FAME). It took some time for this group to organize itself, but an initial meeting, held in Oslo during May 1994, proved fruitful and has led to several additional meetings.34 The most recent programmatic initiative under AEPS is the creation of a Task Force on Sustainable Development and Utilization (TFSDU). Meeting first in Yellowknife during August 1994, in Iqaluit in March 1995, and in Toronto in November 1995, the task force was upgraded to the status of a fully fledged working group at the third AEPS ministerial meeting in March 1996.35 Overall responsibility for the progress of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy is vested in the ministerial meeting expected to convene every second year. Counting the 1991 Rovaniemi meeting as the first ministerial conference, the second convened in Nuuk, Greenland, during September 1993 and the third in Inuvik, Canada, during March 1996. To deal with developments occurring during intervals between ministerial meetings, the members of the regime have established a group known as the Senior Arctic Affairs Officials (SAAOs). This group does not have a specific substantive task or fixed mandate but is expected to hold consultative meetings at least once a year to monitor progress in the implementation of the AEPS and to make preparations for ministerial conferences. The creation of this group is surely an indication of the importance attached to the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy by the member states.36 The regime's scope has broadened during the years since its inception in 1991. This broadening is in part a response to new or intensified environmental concerns, such as the publicizing of the presence of extensive radioactive contamination in the Russian Arctic and the growing concern for the effects of enhanced UV radiation in the Arctic as a consequence of the thinning of the stratospheric ozone layer.37 This increased scope is also a consequence of the growing concerns of indigenous peoples and environmental advocacy groups, as expressed in forums like the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Brazil during June 1992. As a result, interest in the role of traditional ecological knowledge as a source of insights into the workings of Arctic ecosystems is on the rise, and an Indigenous Peoples Secretariat has been established under 34. J. Keller, "Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment (FAME)," WWF Arctic Bulletin, no. 3, 1994, 4. 35. The working groups and programmatic activities of the AEPS will be absorbed during 1997-98 into the Arctic Council. 36. Ray Arnaudo (as interviewed by Elizabeth Leighton), "A SAAO's Eye View of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy," WWF Arctic Bulletin, no. 3, 1994, 6-7. 37. Jeannine Keller, "Sources of Radioactive Contamination in the Russian Arctic Waters," WWF Arctic Bulletin, no. 2, 1994, 16-18.

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the auspices of the AEPS.38 The level of interest in the idea of sustainable development in the Arctic has also risen substantially, even though the operational meaning of the concept is no more clear in this setting than it is in other regions of the world.39 But be that as it may, the general impression created by these developments is that the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy is very much alive and that the regime has done as well as could have been expected by those who signed the Declaration on the Protection of the Arctic Environment in Rovaniemi in June 1991.40 The Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR) Gathered at a conference of foreign ministers in Kirkenes, Norway, during January 1993, representatives of the five Nordic countries, Russia, and the EC Commission agreed on and issued a Declaration on Cooperation in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region (the full text is reprinted as Appendix C).41 Often called the Norwegian Initiative due to the central role of Norway and especially the Norwegian foreign minister, Thorvald Stoltenberg, in developing the conceptual framework undergirding this arrangement, the Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR) constitutes an effort to deal simultaneously with a number of regional concerns of particular relevance to the northernmost part of Europe and with some broader concerns arising from shifts in the political architecture of Europe as a whole.42 It is a highly creative but by no means surefire effort to address several significant political problems simultaneously. Geographically, the Barents Euro-Arctic Region covers an area of over 1.2 million square kilometers that encompasses eight political units: the counties of Nordland, Troms, and Finnmark in Norway; the county of 38. A conference, held in Reykjavik in September 1994 under the auspices of AEPS, focused exclusively on this subject. See Bente V Hansen, ed., AEPS and Indigenous Peoples Knowledge—Report on Seminar on Integration of Indigenous Peoples Knowledge, Copenhagen: Icelandic Ministry for the Environment, Danish Ministry of the Environment, and Home Rule of Greenland, 1994. 39. Franklyn Griffiths and Oran R. Young, "Sustainable Development and the Arctic—Impressions of the Co-chairs from the Second Meeting of the Working Group on Arctic International Relations," Greenland, April 1989. 40. In fact, the performance of this regime has exceeded the expectations of many of those who participated in or monitored its creation. What effect the integration of the AEPS into the work of the Arctic Council will have in these terms remains to be seen. 41. A number of other countries, including France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, attended the conference as observers but did not sign the declaration. 42. Stokke and Tunander, eds., The Barents Region; and Jan Ake Dellenbrant and Mats-Olov Olson, eds., The Barents Region: Security and Economic Development in the European North, Umea: CERUM, 1994.

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Norrbotten in Sweden; the County of Lapland in Finland; and the Murmansk and Archangel Oblasts together with the Republic of Karelia in Russia. A special provision accords the indigenous peoples located throughout the area the status of a ninth unit for purposes of participation in the Barents Region. Although it is far more limited than the area covered by the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, the Barents Region nonetheless encompasses an area twice the size of France. Roughly three quarters of the region's almost 4.5 million inhabitants reside in Russia, including about a million located in the cities of Murmansk and Archangel.43 There is some ambiguity about the extent to which the Barents Region encompasses the marine areas in the adjacent portions of the Norwegian, Barents, and White Seas. The regime's creators shied away from extending the BEAR formally to marine areas on the grounds that such areas are too sensitive in jurisdictional and security terms to serve as fruitful sites for international cooperation. Yet a number of the major issues facing the region today— managing the Barents Sea fisheries, dealing with radioactive contamination in the marine areas surrounding Novaya Zemlya, and preparing for offshore gas development—cannot be addressed successfully without extending the domain of the regime to the adjacent seas, and there is a distinct tendency to include these issues on an informal basis.44 In functional terms, the scope of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region is broad and ambitious. The Kirkenes Declaration speaks explicitly about the need for cooperation in seven areas: the environment, industry, science and technology, infrastructure (including transportation and communications), culture, tourism, and indigenous peoples' issues. Although the declaration expresses the "conviction that the establishment of closer cooperation in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region will be an important contribution to the new European architecture," it is notably circumspect in addressing issues that are overtly political in nature or directly relevant to traditional security concerns. In this sense, the approach adopted in establishing the BEAR has a distinctly neo-functionalist flavor.45 The presumption is, in other words, that building a solid foundation of cooperation regarding pragmatic and even mundane matters like business, education, and environmental 43. Johan J0rgen Hoist, "The Barents Region: Institutions, Cooperation and Prospects," in Stokke and Tunander, eds., The Barents Region, 11-24. See also Finnish Barents Group, "Barents: The Barents Euro-Arctic Region," a publication of the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Committee of Senior Officials of the Barents EuroArctic Region, Helsinki, 1996. 44. Olav Schram Stokke, "Environmental Cooperation as a Driving Force in the Barents Region," in Stokke and Tunander, eds., The Barents Region, 145-58. 45. Ernst B. Haas, Beyond the Nation State: Functionalism and International Organization, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964.

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protection will pay off in the long run in terms of maintaining peace and promoting prosperity. A striking feature of this arrangement, which sets it apart from many other international regimes, is its two-tiered or dual system of membership. On the one hand, the regime is very much a product of conventional international relations in which states are the dominant players. Despite the presence of a larger number of states at Kirkenes, it is now clear that the core members of this regime are Finland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden and that a major concern of the regime is the development of a clear-cut basis for peaceful cooperation in the northern tier of Europe in the aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the same time, the involvement of the eight regional governments and the representatives of the region's indigenous peoples is an important element of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region. The regional governments control much of the action on the ground in the Barents Region, even in the Nordic states, where county governments are relatively weak vis-a-vis central governments; the hammering out of working relationships between the regional authorities and the national authorities regarding Barents Region initiatives will surely be one of the key determinants of the success of this regime over time. Interestingly, NGOs (other than those representing indigenous peoples) appear to have been less active in the creation of this regime than they were in the formation of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy. On its face, the area encompassed by the Barents Euro-Arctic Region seems an unlikely candidate for regime formation. It is a remote periphery that until recently was one of the most sensitive frontiers of the Cold War in military terms; it remains even now a home base for some of the world's most sophisticated strategic weapons systems and an area in which American and Russian naval forces monitor each other's activities closely. Under the circumstances, the secret to success in this case lay in the ability of Stoltenberg and his colleagues to redefine issues and to join distinct items on domestic and international political agendas together in a new and creative way. In essence, they transformed liabilities, as seen from a Cold War perspective, into opportunities to make a contribution toward solving some of the important problems of the new Europe. As a result, the Barents Euro-Arctic Region has been both explained and justified as a means of dealing with at least four differentiable concerns.46 It offers the prospect of bolstering the economies and protecting the ecosystems of northern Fennoscandia by connecting the northern counties of the Nordic states in economically and environmentally productive ways 46. Stokke and Tunander, eds., The Barents Region.

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to their counterparts in northwestern Russia. It provides an expanding European Union—which now includes Finland and Sweden as full members—with a resource rich Arctic of its own that can supply raw materials to industrial centers to the South in much the same way that the North American Arctic does for Canada and the United States and the Asian Arctic does for Russia. It initiates a process of integrating Russia peacefully into the new political architecture of Europe. And it holds out the promise of mobilizing the rising interest in the idea of a Europe of Regions to protect the small Nordic states from the growing influence of a unified Germany in an expanding European Union. As is often the case in the politics of regime formation, there are good reasons to conclude that in coming together to create the Barents Region, individual participants were responding to different combinations of these motivating forces. The actual substantive content of the Kirkenes Declaration is limited. There are the inevitable endorsements of the work of the Conference (since 1995, the "Organization") on Security and Cooperation in Europe, sustainable development, the process of reform in Russia, and the need to take environmental impacts seriously. But this is not a regime that lays down an elaborate system of regulative rules that participants agree to comply with or an explicit procedure for making joint decisions about things like shared natural resources. Its emphasis, rather, is on identifying a variety of programmatic activities through which the members can pursue common goals and on committing actors at all levels to make a concerted effort to achieve these goals. To the extent that it succeeds, therefore, the Barents Region will become an area in which an increasingly dense network of cooperative activities ties its members together in mutually beneficial relationships in much the same way that the early efforts of the European Economic Community tied together its six original members.47 What the Kirkenes Declaration does is create several organizational entities to manage and carry out the work of the regime. These include the Barents Euro-Arctic Council and the Regional Council of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region. Although the Barents Euro-Arctic Council is an interstate body that consists formally of the signatories to the Kirkenes Declaration—others are invited to join—it is apparent that Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Russia are the core members of the whole arrangement, and the foreign ministers of these four countries will rotate as chair of the council on an annual basis. Not surprisingly, the foreign minister of Norway became the first chair; the chair then passed to Finland in 1994 and to Russia in 1995. The council is expected to convene once a year at the 47. Ernst B. Haas, The Uniting of Europe, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958.

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foreign minister level and make decisions by consensus. Taking its cue from the practice of the European Union, however, the council may also meet from time to time as a gathering of environment ministers, economics ministers, and so forth. For its part, the Regional Council is made up of county officials in the area covered by the regime and representatives of the region's indigenous peoples. This council has an executive secretary and a secretariat based in Kirkenes. The position of chair of the council, which was held initially by Norway but rotates every two years, passed to Sweden in 1995.48 The Kirkenes Declaration has little to say about relations between the two councils. It is also largely silent about finances, although Norway as the regime's original champion committed substantial resources to this initiative as a way of providing an initial stimulus for the enterprise. With the publication of the Barents Programme toward the end of 1994, the issue of financing programmatic activities carried out under the auspices of the BEAR has become a prominent agenda item, and the members of the regime have now begun to address this issue systematically. The BEAR has moved forward for the most part on a fast track. The decision to proceed with explicit negotiations was taken during the spring of 1992. The parties signed the Kirkenes Declaration announcing the formation of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region in January 1993. Since then, the participants—with Norway still in the lead—have organized a remarkable number of meetings and initiatives designed to breathe life into this arrangement. The 1994 Barents Programme is an ambitious plan that covers a wide range of specific projects. At the same time, events on the ground have moved fast as well. Changes in Russia continue to unfold at a bewildering pace. If anything, the overall pattern of these changes has become even harder to discern following the parliamentary elections of December 1993 and December 1995—which resulted in the rise first of Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his nationalist followers and then of a revamped Communist Party under the leadership of Gennadi Zyuganov—and the 1996 presidential election, which returned Boris Yeltsin for a second term. The political architecture of Europe is changing rapidly as well. But as recent developments in Belarus, Hungary, and the Ukraine remind us, it would be foolish to presume that the central tendency of these changes is clear-cut or easy to discern. For their part, the economic problems of northern Fennoscandia remain to be solved. 48. Sweden established a small secretariat in Lulea to backstop its role as chair of the Regional Council. This has raised questions about the division of labor between this secretariat and the Kirkenes Secretariat, which shows no signs of going out of business.

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Undoubtedly, the fate of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region will be determined in considerable measure by the course of these broad contextual developments. Nonetheless, the Norwegian Initiative has triggered a significant institutional development. In contrast to the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, which addresses a limited functional agenda in circumarctic terms, the BEAR covers a wide range of issues over a more restricted geographical area. As reflected in frequent references to the political architecture of Europe and the changing constellation of political forces, the Barents Regime also has deeper roots in the traditional concerns of "high" politics than the environmental protection arrangement articulated in the AEPS. In an important sense, these regimes exemplify two distinct approaches to the pursuit of sustained international cooperation through the creation of institutional arrangements in today's world. Arctic Futures Where are the international relations of the Arctic headed? What are the implications of probable changes in these broader terms for the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region? To round out this introductory discussion of international cooperation in the Arctic and to complete the task of providing a context for the in-depth treatment of the stages of regime formation that follows, this section briefly explores these questions. The Circumpolar North has changed fundamentally in the past decade. The Cold War is over, leaving the future role of this region in the global strategic balance a matter of some speculation. Although the Arctic remains a deployment zone for strategic weapons systems, the passing of the Cold War has ended the bifurcation of the Arctic. The Eurasian Arctic and the North American Arctic are now open to each other, a fact that encourages EastWest movements in the Far North and makes it increasingly realistic to speak of the Arctic as a single region.49 Additionally, the Soviet Union is gone, and the Russian Federation, the successor to the Soviet state in the North, has become something of a magnet for industries interested in the exploitation of natural resources, environmental groups looking for new challenges, and scientists seeking to unlock the secrets of global change or to broaden our understanding of northern ecosystems through comparative work in the Eurasian Arctic and the North American Arctic. Of course, it is difficult to predict the outcome of the inner struggles taking place in Russia. 49. Oran R. Young and Arkady I. Cherkasov, "International Co-operation in the Arctic: Opportunities and Constraints," and Franklyn Griffiths, "Civility in the Arctic," in Griffiths, ed., Arctic Alternatives, 9-25 and 279-309.

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But there is no escaping the fact that Russia, in contrast to the old Soviet Union, is and will remain overwhelmingly an Arctic state.50 Among the Arctic Eight, only Canada, which is runner-up to Russia on most measures of "northernness" or "nordicity," can be compared with Russia in these terms.51 The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union have also created opportunities for other players to assume a higher profile in Arctic affairs. A striking feature of this development is the growing role of nonstate actors—especially indigenous peoples' groups and environmental advocacy groups—in Arctic affairs. In the case of indigenous peoples' groups, the fall of Cold War barriers has facilitated efforts to make common cause on a circumpolar basis, most specifically in the form of an Arctic Leaders' Summit.52 The striking success of indigenous peoples at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, attributable in part to the articulate participation of northern Natives, has also served to raise consciousness regarding indigenous issues in the Far North among Natives and non-Natives alike.53 With respect to environmental advocacy groups, the big news is that a number of the major organizations—the National Audubon Society, the Environmental Defense Fund, Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Wide Fund for Nature, to name a few—have discovered the Arctic as an attractive focus for programmatic attention.54 To be sure, the specific interests of these groups vary. Audubon, for instance, has taken a special interest in the Bering Sea area, or Beringia.55 The Environmental Defense Fund has developed a program to track airborne and waterborne pollutants throughout the Arctic region and to investigate the effects of pollutants on a variety of Arctic organisms.56 Greenpeace has 50. Whereas the Central Asian republics balanced the influence of the North in the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation is predominantly a northern state; more than 60 percent of the Federation can be classified as Arctic or northern. 51. On the idea of "nordicity," see Louis-Edmond Hamelin, Canadian Nordicity: It's 'Your North, Too, trans. William Barr, Montreal: Harvest Books, 1979. 52. Faegteborg, Towards an International Indigenous Arctic Policy. 53. Agenda 21: Earth's Action Plan is one of the major documents adopted at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Brazil during June 1992. Chapter 26 is entitled "Recognizing and Strengthening the Role of Indigenous People and Their Communities." 54. The Arctic activities of individual organizations wax and wane over time. A good source of information on these efforts is the WWF Arctic Bulletin, published since the beginning of 1994 by the WWF International Arctic Programme based in Oslo. 55. National Audubon Society, "Beringia Conservation Program: Progress Report 1992"; and Dave Cline, "Beringia: Hands Across the Continents," 1994. Both reports are available from the Alaska-Hawaii Regional Office in Anchorage, Alaska. 56. "Large-Scale Pollution Revealed Throughout the Arctic," EOF Letter 24 (September 1993): 1 and 5.

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focused attention on radioactive contamination in the Russian Arctic caused by fallout from nuclear tests on Novaya Zemlya, the disposal of radioactive wastes and spent reactors in the Barents and Kara Seas, and the flushing of radioactive wastes into the Arctic by way of the Ob and Yenesei Rivers. But overall, the emergence of these groups and the alliances they form (e.g., the Arctic Network in the United States) as major players on the Arctic scene is a development to be taken seriously.57 In terms of international cooperation in the Arctic, we can expect these developments to have a number of effects. Most immediately, there will be pressure to expand and, in some instances, redirect the activities of arrangements like the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region.58 Many individuals and organizations alike have expressed a growing interest in the idea of sustainable development as a priority for the Arctic.59 This will surely mean different things to different constituencies. In the hands of indigenous peoples' groups, for example, it is apt to mean taking steps to safeguard their traditional way of life, including the harvesting or consumptive use of marine mammals. In the hands of environmental advocacy groups, by contrast, it may serve as a justification for proposals to create a circumpolar system of protected natural areas encompassing large marine and terrestrial ecosystems. But the very porosity of the concept is one of its attractions from a political point of view. A variety of actors can join forces under the banner of sustainable development, as long as no one becomes too particular about the operational content of the commitments they make. Beyond this, interest is clearly growing in the idea of creating a more comprehensive international regime for the Arctic.60 Facilitated by the opening of the Arctic following the end of the Cold War and spearheaded by environmental advocacy groups fresh from a major victory involving mineral resources and environmental protection in the Antarctic, this campaign is likely to focus initially on environmental matters and to place heavy em57. Since September 1994, the U.S. Arctic Network has been publishing a newsletter called Leads: U.S. Arctic Network News Summary. 58. See, for example, Ray Arnaudo's 1994 statement to the effect that "I would like to see us broaden the scope of the [AEPS] issues. This would allow us to look at development, trade, indigenous peoples' concerns and other issues" (Arnaudo, "A SAAO's Eye View," 7). 59. The AEPS Task Force on Sustainable Development and Utilization produced an extensive report on matters of sustainable development in the Arctic in preparation for the third ministerial conference in March 1996. See also Jyrki Kakonen, ed., Politics and Sustainable Growth in the Arctic, Brookfield, Vt.: Dartmouth Publishing Company, 1993. 60. One interesting step in this direction is the recent proposal for a circumpolar system of Arctic protected areas. See "Circumpolar System of Protected Ecosystems," WWF Arctic Bulletin, no. 1, 1994, 16.

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phasis on the protection of ecosystems by placing them off limits to various kinds of human activities. Advocates are also likely to espouse the development of a legally binding agreement.61 But many features of this movement have not yet come into focus. Will it, for instance, seek to join environmental issues with other functional concerns to support the idea of creating a multifunctional arrangement for the Arctic? Will it limit its prescriptions to the establishment of a set of well-defined regulative rules or press on with proposals for the creation of Arctic organizations to administer the resultant rules and mount programmatic initiatives in the circumarctic region? Will it call for arrangements in which there is a clear-cut role for various nonstate actors, whether or not states remain the principal members of a comprehensive Arctic regime in formal terms? All these questions remain to be answered over the next five to ten years, and there is ample room for conflicts of interest to emerge amid efforts to address this range of issues. As a result, there is no reason to assume that the advance of Arctic cooperation will proceed smoothly or inexorably in the near future. But the simple fact that these issues are moving to center stage in the Arctic today is testimony to the remarkable changes that have occurred in this region over the last decade. Anyone who had the audacity to forecast in 1986 the emergence of this agenda of international cooperation in the Arctic within ten years would surely have been dismissed as a starry-eyed visionary.62 A specific development that will affect the course of international cooperation in the Arctic during the near future is the launching of the Arctic Council through the signing of the Declaration on the Establishment of the Arctic Council in September 1996. The council has a broad mandate in functional terms and seems likely to emerge as a forum in which a wide range of constituencies possessing Arctic interests can meet and pursue their goals in concert with others.63 The implications of this development for the AEPS and the BEAR are not yet entirely clear, but they may turn out to be far-reaching. Current plans envision a procedure under which the AEPS will be subsumed under the overarching umbrella of the Arctic Council, a move that could serve to strengthen the commitment of the Arctic states to the cause of environmental protection or, more broadly, sustainable development. The impact of the creation of the 61. See, for example, Donat Pharand, "Draft Arctic Treaty: An Arctic Region Council," Northern Perspectives 19 (Summer 1991): 20-23. 62. This was a common reaction to my own efforts during the mid-1980s to draw attention to the growing importance of the Arctic in international relations. See Young, "Age of the Arctic," Foreign Policy 61 (Winter 1985-86): 160-79. 63. For a discussion of the origins of the Arctic Council and its prospective role in the region, see Oran R. Young, "The Arctic Council: Marking a New Era in International Relations," A Twentieth Century Fund Report, New York, 1996.

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council on the activities of subregional arrangements like the BEAR are somewhat harder to foresee. Still, it seems inevitable that this development will trigger a growing concern for working out mutually acceptable relationships that allow the efforts of those pursuing regional cooperation and subregional cooperation in the Arctic to proceed simultaneously without producing severe friction or open conflict. There remains one additional feature of this series of developments that bears directly on the prospects for the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region. The two cases this study examines in depth reflect distinctive perspectives on the shape and content of institutional arrangements at the international level. One is environment-specific, wide-ranging in its geographical coverage, and comparatively open with respect to the activities of nonstate actors. The other is multifunctional, directed toward a more limited geographical area, and much more dominated by governments (including subnational as well as national governments). No doubt, there is room for both types of regimes in the Arctic. But it takes little imagination to understand that the two approaches will prove particularly attractive to different constituencies or interest groups. It is hardly surprising, for example, that the environmental advocacy groups have concentrated on the work of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy and see in it possibilities for pursuing an agenda somewhat similar to the agenda embedded in the provisions of the 1991 Environment Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty. Similarly, the attractions of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region are apparent to those concerned with the political architecture of Europe as well as the nitty-gritty aspects of dealing with a range of practical concerns in the area (e.g., the development of modern infrastructure for the Kola Peninsula, the use of Norwegian shipyards to service Russian fishing vessels, or the modernization of the antiquated Severonickel and Pechenganickel smelters).64 It may be that these disparate approaches to institution building can proceed separately and at their own pace without interfering with one another. Yet this view may prove optimistic, if only because resources available to devote to international cooperation are always limited. Additionally, this two-track system raises significant questions about the consequences of international cooperation for the interests of the region's indigenous peoples and about the future course of the Arctic Council. There is some danger that due to the growing influence of the big environmental advocacy groups, the interests of the Arctic's Native peoples will be subordinated to other concerns articulated in the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy. 64. Stokke, "Environmental Cooperation."

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The priority attached to building up western-style economies in the northernmost counties of the Nordic states and the northwestern oblasts of Russia could likewise compromise the welfare of the Native peoples of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region. For its part, it is possible that the Arctic Council will be shunted aside because it is too broad in functional terms to attract the wholehearted support of environmental groups and because it is too broad in geographical terms to constitute a priority project for those interested in subregional problems, like those of the Barents Region. None of this is meant to suggest that the cause of international cooperation in the Arctic in general and of the Arctic Council in particular will not prosper during the foreseeable future; the general tenor of the analysis set forth in this chapter would have seemed astonishing to anyone contemplating Arctic issues as recently as a decade ago. But these observations do make it clear that the growth of international cooperation is not inevitable in a region like the Arctic and that cooperation is not always and necessarily a good thing from the point of view of those whose interests may be affected by the growth of new regimes.

CHAPTER THREE

Agenda Formation: The Finnish Initiative and the Norwegian Initiative

A

s William Riker rightly observes in introducing an important collection of essays on agenda formation, "Agendas foreshadow outcomes: the shape of the agenda influences the choices made from it. Today we are intensely aware of this fact, but our knowledge about it is relatively new."1 Despite growing interest in the study of agenda formation, the subject is difficult to address effectively within the confines of mainstream models of collective choice. These models, exemplified by game-theoretic analyses of bargaining and microeconomic analyses of competitive equilibrium, typically ignore agenda formation by positing actors who face clear-cut alternatives and possess well-defined utility functions and by directing attention to the nature of the interactive decisionmaking occurring under such conditions. The findings flowing from this stream of work appear, at least initially, to cut to the heart of the problem of collective choice, and they have the virtue of being derivable from models that are analytically tractable. Small wonder, then, that agenda formation has long been treated as a kind of analytic backwater in theories of interactive decisionmaking. Yet this state of affairs, as Riker's comment implies, will not do as a basis for taking the next steps toward understanding the dynamics of collective choice. Agendas not only define options and, in the process, limit the range of results that can emerge from interactive decisionmaking but they also determine whether issues come to the attention of the members of a social group in a timely manner and how issues are framed for purposes of collective choice. Whatever the limits of scholarship in this realm, moreover, those actually engaged in processes of collective choice are seldom slow to recognize the importance of agenda formation and to grasp the advantages that often flow from an ability to exercise control over the process. In this regard, there is nothing unusual about efforts to create international institutions, like the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR). A study of the forces 1. William H. Riker, "Introduction," in Riker, ed., Agenda Formation, 1.

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that shaped the agenda in these cases can therefore illuminate the dynamics of agenda formation more generally. In this chapter, I present a detailed account of the stage of agenda formation in the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR. Brief agenda formation chronologies for the two cases set the stage for the substantive analysis that follows. The analysis itself unfolds in four steps. Step one focuses on factors that determine how and when issues like those posed by the AEPS and the BEAR make their way onto the international political agenda. Step two encompasses the process of framing these issues for active consideration in policy arenas. This is followed by step three, which directs attention to the rise of the AEPS and the BEAR to a position of priority on the political agenda—what I call moving to the front burner in policy terms. Step four takes up the question of trigger mechanisms that lead to a graduation to the stage of negotiation. The chapter concludes with a section that revisits Chapter 1's hypotheses about the political dynamics of regime formation and assesses the preceding account of the stage of agenda formation in the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR in the light of these hypotheses. As the analysis presented in this chapter shows, issues typically make their way onto the international political agenda through a process involving the fusion of local or geographically delimited concerns and larger, more generic concerns. Two distinct patterns of issue framing are discernible: one combining the collection of matters of interest to different players into a single package and the other characterized by the articulation of a coherent vision by one player that endeavors to sell its vision to the others. The emergence of a champion is a necessary condition for an issue to move to the top of the political agenda. But champions must find ways to enlist the support of others rather than forcing others to accept their preferences. Even then, there is no assurance that an issue will graduate from the stage of agenda formation to the stage of negotiation. Graduation typically follows some catalytic event, which may involve occurrences that are not part of the stream of conscious efforts to form a regime. Agenda Formation Chronologies In the nature of things, it is easier to say when the stage of agenda formation ends than when it begins. In the case of the AEPS, the end of this stage can be traced with some precision to a press conference held in Paris on 30 August 1989 at which the government of Finland announced the agreement to hold the first preparatory meeting on environmental protection of

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the Arctic and to the ensuing consultation that took place in Rovaniemi, Finland, from 20 to 26 September 1989. With regard to the BEAR, the analogous transition occurred in conjunction with a meeting between Thorvald Stoltenberg of Norway and Andrei Kozyrev of Russia in March 1992 that set the stage for a gathering of regional governors in Tromso, Norway, on 25 April 1992, during which the participants "agreed to work for closer cooperation between the Norwegian and Russian North as a first step towards establishing a Barents Region."2 No such precision is possible in identifying the onset of agenda formation. Yet, as the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR suggest, we are not without clues in seeking to place chronological bounds on the onset of agenda formation in our efforts to understand the political dynamics of regime formation. As I pointed out in the preceding chapter, both the AEPS and the BEAR are products of the growing interest in international cooperation in the Arctic associated with the ending of the Cold War and symbolized by Mikhail Gorbachev's speech in Murmansk on 1 October 1987.3 It would not be altogether inappropriate, therefore, to trace the process of agenda formation in both cases to the fall of 1987 (see Tables 3.1 and 3.2). But to be more specific, two separate events coalesced to initiate agenda formation in the case of the AEPS by the middle of 1988; two other events occurring in quick succession energized and broadened the process in early 1989. The first event was the political, in contrast to the radioactive, fallout from the Chernobyl disaster. The accident itself occurred toward the end of April 1986, producing a radioactive cloud that spread over a sizable segment of Fennoscandia during the ensuing months.4 Yet it took some time for the full implications of this tragedy, measured in terms of threats to the lifestyle of Saami reindeer herders and dangers to human health in the Far North, to become apparent. A second formative event was the documentation during 1987-88 of the scale of sulfur dioxide emissions arising from the Pechenganikel and Severonikel smelters in Nikel and Monchegorsk on the Kola Peninsula and crossing the international frontier into Finland, together with the publicizing of the destructive potential of this transboundary flux of airborne pollution for Finland's northern forests.5 Coming a year later, the 2. Olav Schram Stokke and Ola Tunander, "Introduction," in Stokke and Tunander, eds., The Barents Region, 1. 3. For a variety of perspectives on this development, see Griffiths, ed., Arctic Alternatives. 4. Hugh Beach, "Perceptions of Risk, Dilemmas of Policy: Nuclear Fallout in Swedish Lapland," Social Science and Medicine 30 (1990): 729-38. 5. Tapani Vaahtoranta, "Environmental Protection in Finnish-Soviet Relations: The Case of the Nickel Smelters in the Kola Peninsula," paper presented at the annual con vention of the International Studies Association, Vancouver, 20-23 March 1991; and

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Table 3.1 Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) agenda formation timeline 1 October 1987 15 January 1988

Gorbachev speech in Murmansk Norwegian/Soviet bilateral agreement on environmental protection

12-15 December 1988

Leningrad conference on scientific research in the Arctic

26 March 1989 7 April 1989 Sinking of the Komsomolets 30 August 1989

Wreck of the Exxon Valdez

7 April 1989 Sinking of the Komsomolets Paris press conference

Table 3.2 Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR) agenda formation timeline 1 July 1991

Swedish application for EU membership

31 December 1991 1 January 1992

Official end of the Soviet Union Russian Federation assumes Soviet international obligations

7 February 1992

Treaty of European Union signed in Maastricht

5-6 March 1992

Copenhagen meeting of foreign ministers of the Baltic Sea states Stoltenberg/Kozyrev meeting

7 March 1992 18 March 1992 9 April 1992 2 May 1992

Finnish application for EU membership New Baltic Sea Convention signed Agreement on the European Economic Area signed

March 1989 wreck of the supertanker Exxon Valdez in Alaska's Prince William Sound and the April 1989 sinking of the nuclear-powered submarine Komsomolets in the Barents Sea served to confirm the reality of environmental threats to the Arctic and to demonstrate their circumpolar reach.6 In the process, these specific occurrences both added a new dimension to the Arctic environmental agenda and energized a process that had begun a year or more earlier with concerns about terrestrial pollution in the European North. For its part, the onset of agenda formation in the case of the BEAR can be traced to a cluster of separate but cumulatively potent European events occurring during the second half of 1991 and the early months of 1992. Included in the cluster are the final disappearance of the Soviet Union, Mats-Olov Olsson and Alexei V Sekarev, "Environment and Security on the Kola Peninsula," in Jan Ake Dellenbrant and Mats-Olov Olsson, eds., The Barents Region: Security and Economic Development in the European North, Umea: CERUM, 1994, 138-55. 6. Art Davidson, In the Wake of the Exxon Valdez: The Devastating Impact of the Alaska Oil Spill, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990.

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announcements by both Sweden and Finland of their intentions to seek membership in the European Community, and the signing of the Treaty of Maastricht in February 1992.7 Taken together, these occurrences signaled a radical change in the political architecture of northern Europe and triggered a conscious effort within the Norwegian Foreign Ministry to find a basis for coming to terms with this rapidly changing political landscape. The resultant Norwegian Initiative quickly affected the thinking of others located in what would soon be characterized as the Barents Euro-Arctic Region. Under the circumstances, it is fair to say that agenda formation in the rapidly unfolding process that eventuated in the Kirkenes Declaration in January 1993 was well under way by the start of 1992. What emerges from these chronologies is a bounded, though by no means rigidly demarcated, process of agenda formation that we can focus on in thinking about the political dynamics of regime creation. To be sure, a determined observer may identify certain precursors of these developments in earlier events, stretching back even before the fall of 1987 in the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR. Nor is this periodization meant to suggest that efforts to frame and reframe issues came to an end with the beginning of explicit negotiations in September 1989 in the case of the AEPS and in the aftermath of the April 1992 Tromso meeting in the case of the BEAR. But for purposes of examining the nature of agenda formation, it seems appropriate to zero in on the period from early 1988 to September 1989 in the case of the AEPS and from late 1991 to April 1992 in the case of the BEAR.

Getting onto the Agenda How do discrete issues find their way onto the international political agenda? A simple answer assumes that inscription on this agenda occurs more or less automatically or spontaneously following the emergence of problems that are important in some objective sense. But this interpretation is surely naive. It does not, for example, explain why Arctic haze— a very real phenomenon—has never become a politically potent issue in the Circumpolar North,8 while major oil spills in Arctic marine systems— a future possibility—are widely regarded as a matter of considerable importance. Nor does it account for the fact that oil spills in the Russian North, which have occurred with some regularity over a period of years, 7. Stokke and Tunander, "Introduction." 8. Soroos, "Arctic Haze and Transboundary Air Pollution," 186-222.

marine Komsomolets in the Barents Sea served to confirm the reality of en-

75

suddenly burst onto the scene as a matter of international concern toward the end of 1994.9 No doubt, the availability of information and the configuration of the interests of influential players have a good deal to do with these developments. But the creation stories of the AEPS and the BEAR suggest that issues are often propelled onto the international political agenda through a process involving the fusion of local or geographically delimited concerns and broader, more generic concerns. Local issues not tied to broader concerns—either tangibly or symbolically—do not warrant serious consideration at the international level, no matter how important they may seem to those directly affected. But broader issues that cannot be linked to or represented in terms of more specific concerns are unlikely to achieve sufficient focus to show up as action items on the international political agenda. It is the joining of the two, a process that produces concrete issues embodying larger concerns, that ordinarily allows issues to win a place on the international political agenda. The story of the AEPS is an example of how this dynamic works in practice. As the term "Finnish Initiative" suggests, Finland emerged as the driving force behind the effort to place environmental protection in the Arctic on the international political agenda during 1988. The Finns not only started the ball rolling but also refused to let the issue fade away in the face of disinterest on the part of many and actual antagonism on the part of some. In assuming this role, Finland was not playing the part of an altruist. Rather, policymakers in Helsinki sought to promote several specific and somewhat circumscribed Finnish interests through a process of embedding them in a larger, multilateral Arctic project. During the mid-1980s, the Finnish government had launched a campaign to portray Finland as an Arctic country—a somewhat difficult task given the facts that Finland has no border on the Arctic Ocean and that other Arctic states, including the Soviet Union and the United States, were not in the habit of treating Finland as an Arctic country.10 In the process, Finland invested heavily in the development of Lapland and devised a strategy for promoting Lapland as a destination of interest to Europeans. Added to this were the environmental concerns that crystallized in 1988 around anxiety regarding the 9. See Sam Howe Verhovek, "Ruptured Pipeline Spreading Hot Oil in Russia's Arctic," New York Times, 25 October 1994, Al and A14; and Claudia Rosett, "Big Oil-Pipeline Spill May Be a Sign of Things to Come," Wall Street Journal, 27 October 1994, A17. 10. Signaling a desire to gain acceptance as a state with recognized bipolar interests, Finland also became an Antarctic Treaty Consultative Party (ATCP) during 1984 and established a base for scientific research in Antarctica during the 1988-89 season.

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possible impacts on Finland's northern forests of transboundary fluxes of sulfur emissions from the nickel smelters of the Kola Peninsula.11 It will come as no surprise, under the circumstances, that Ambassador Esko Rajakoski, the Finnish Foreign Ministry's most committed and unflagging spokesperson for Finland's Arctic interests, is a northerner himself. These local concerns go some distance toward explaining Finland's motivations in launching the initiative that produced the AEPS in 1991. But what broader issues were at stake, and why did the other Arctic states accede to pressure from Finland to accept environmental protection in the Arctic as an acknowledged item on the international political agenda? Finnish policymakers saw in this initiative a way to deal constructively with Mikhail Gorbachev's October 1987 Murmansk speech and, in the process, to carve out a unique role for Finland. In essence, they adopted a strategy of responding selectively to Gorbachev's proposals and sought to take advantage of Finland's role as a link between the Soviet Union and western states possessing Arctic interests. Their goal was to defuse Gorbachev's initiative, using it as a jumping-off point to encourage the development of international cooperation in the Arctic on a more limited basis. The Finnish Initiative fell on fertile ground, at least in part, because it offered a suitable vehicle for addressing such broader concerns. It soon became apparent that Gorbachev's Murmansk speech signaled a real shift in Soviet policy regarding Arctic issues and that the climate for international cooperation in the region had improved markedly. Recalling the earlier role of environmental initiatives within the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) process—the effort that lead to the 1979 Geneva Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP) began in response to a proposal Leonid Brezhnev articulated in the context of CSCE activities12—a number of policymakers in other northern governments saw in the Finnish Initiative an opportunity to initiate a similar multilateral process in the Arctic. The growing prominence of environmental concerns worldwide undoubtedly added to the attractiveness of environmental issues as a suitable vehicle for promoting international cooperation in the Arctic. 11. Vaahtoranta, "Environmental Protection"; and Heidi Hiltunen, Finland and Environmental Problems in Russia and Estonia, Helsinki: Finnish Institute of International Affairs, 1994. Recent evidence has raised some questions about the scope and severity of the impacts of transboundary fluxes of airborne pollutants on the forests of northern Finland. But this does not alter the fact that anxiety concerning possible impacts was a potent force during 1988 and 1989. 12. Evgeny Chossudovsky, "East-West" Diplomacy for the Environment in the United Nations: The High-Level Meeting Within the Framework of the ECE on the Protection of the Environment, New York: United Nations Institute for Training and Research, 1990.

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59

It is noteworthy, for example, that the Finnish Initiative followed directly on the heels of the publication, in 1987, of Our Common Future, the influential report of the World Commission on Environment and Development chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway.13 The late 1980s witnessed as well a striking growth of interest in a number of quarters in the concept of the Arctic as a distinct region in policy terms and, more specifically, in the idea of the Arctic Eight—Canada, Denmark/Greenland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the Soviet Union (Russia), Sweden, and the United States—as the appropriate grouping of states to include in framing Arctic initiatives.14 From this perspective, too, the environmental concerns articulated in the Finnish Initiative emerged as an attractive vehicle—high profile but not overly contentious—for the pursuit of more general Arctic objectives. The story of the creation of the BEAR reveals a similar pattern. The Nordic states have long been concerned about the socioeconomic viability of their northern counties. In essence, these counties—Nordland, Troms, and Finnmark in Norway; Norrbotten in Sweden; and Lapland in Finland—are peripheries in classic core/periphery relationships.15 They are rich in natural resources of considerable importance to the industrial metropoles located to the south, but they suffer from the patterns of emigration, dependence on transfer payments, and lack of political autonomy that are characteristic of resource rich hinterlands. Two factors exacerbated this concern with respect to Fennoscandia during the early 1990s: the rigors imposed by a regionwide recession, and the new issues raised by the opening of Russia's borders with Norway and Finland in northern Europe. Unemployment in Finland exceeded 20 percent during these years. Even Sweden, famous for its comprehensive welfare system, was forced to cut services substantially to curb a burgeoning national debt. In this setting, the reemergence of economic relations between northern Fennoscandia and the Murmansk and Archangel regions of Russia appeared as a mixed blessing. Especially in Norway, this development produced additional work for fish processors and shipyards in northern communities like Kirkenes. But at the same time, the opening of the borders posed major challenges in terms of regulating the flow of people and the growth of black market activities in northern Europe. Portrayed somewhat romantically in public discourse as a revival of the historical Pomor trade, the es13. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. 14. Young, Arctic Politics, esp. chap. 12. 15. Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe and British National Development, 1536-1966, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975; and Dryzek and Young, "Internal Colonialism or Self-Sufficiency?"

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tablishment of these connections posed practical challenges of considerable magnitude to local authorities.16 Intensifying these economic concerns was a growing apprehension about environmental threats to northern Fennoscandia. Some of the resultant issues were specific in character—like the actual dangers posed by sulfur emissions from Russian smelters and radioactive contamination from the disposal of nuclear reactors, and the potential environmental dangers arising from oil and gas development during the foreseeable future in the European Arctic. Others were more general in character, constituting the flip side of the economic concerns identified in the preceding paragraph. In effect, any economic development initiated to alleviate the marginalization of northern Fennoscandia would be likely to generate environmental impacts of a nontrivial nature. It is understandable, therefore, that environmental problems sited in the region itself became a "political dynamo in the Barents Region cooperation"17 and that the idea of devising an environmental action program for the region became a prominent feature of the negotiations that ensued once the issue was accepted as a recognized agenda item. As in the case of the AEPS, these local concerns explain the interest in cooperative initiatives among policymakers responsible for Fennoscandia itself. But here, too, it was the fusion of these local concerns with a set of broader issues that propelled the BEAR onto the international political agenda. Five such issues, involving the "emergence of new constellations of power, new hierarchies of actors, new coalitions and new political conflicts"18 are easily discernible in this connection. Two of these issues cen tered on the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union; the other three revolved around the growth of the European Union, the emergence of a reunited Germany as the most powerful member of the Union, and the rise of the concept of subsidiarity as the basis for a Europe of Regions.19 Taken together, these developments posed both challenges and opportunities of fundamental proportions for Europe's northern periphery. Not only were perspectives long taken for granted during the postwar era—Denmark and Norway confronting the Soviet Union as members of 16. Ola Tunander, "Inventing the Barents Region: Overcoming the East-West Divide," in Stokke and Tunander, eds., The Barents Region, 31-44. 17. Stokke, "Environmental Cooperation," 156. 18. Sverre Jervell, "A Report from Europe's Northern Periphery," in Kukk, Jervell, arid Joenniemi, eds., The Baltic Sea Area, 11. 19. John Mikal Kvistad, "The Barents Spirit": The Process of Regionalization and Norwegian Foreign Policy in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region, master's thesis, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, February 1994, part 3; and Noralv Veggeland, "Th Barents Region as a European Frontier Region," in Stokke and Tunander, eds., The Barents Region, 201-12.

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NATO, with Finland and Sweden as neutrals—overturned with the end of the Cold War, but also the emergence of Russia in place of the Soviet Union posed profound questions regarding the need to integrate this new state into the rapidly evolving political order of Europe. Similarly, the transition from the European Community to the European Union along with the reunification of Germany forced the Nordic countries to rethink their own relationship to Europe. In effect, the Nordics found themselves in need of a new vision that would provide a basis for constructive relations with Russia, a balance between involvement and autonomy in relations with the European Union, and continuing friendship with the United States. In a sense, all these concerns came into focus with particular clarity in the Barents Region, the site of western Europe's only common border with Russia as well as a storehouse of raw materials on a scale sufficient to interest members of the EU in the concept of a European Arctic. Because of its central role in Fennoscandia and its deep ambivalences about future relations with the EU, Norway emerged as the key player in the political turbulence that created the conditions needed for the idea of a Barents Euro-Arctic Region to flourish. But it is fair to say that it was the conjunction of these larger, almost geopolitical, concerns and the more local economic and environmental concerns of northern Fennoscandia proper that propelled the issue of the Barents Region onto the international political agenda and provided the political context out of which the Norwegian Initiative emerged. Three additional observations will help to flesh out the process through which issues providing opportunities for multilateral cooperation find their way onto the international political agenda. Given the upsurge of interest in the activities of nonstate actors and the roles such actors played in later stages of the regime formation process with respect to the AEPS and, to a lesser extent, the BEAR, it may come as something of a surprise to learn that the emergence of these issues as acknowledged agenda items was largely the work of national policymakers.20 This does not mean that policymakers within the various Arctic states always saw eye-to-eye regarding these matters. Initially, for example, officials in the Norwegian Environment Ministry were considerably more receptive than their counterparts in the Foreign Ministry to the idea of accepting environmental protection in the Arctic as a legitimate issue for international consideration. For its part, the idea of organizing cooperative activities around the concept of a Barents Euro-Arctic Region became the focus of a sharp debate within the 20. See, for example, Hoist, "The Barents Region," and Andrei Kozyrev, "Cooperation in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region: Promising Beginning," in Stokke and Tunander, eds., The Barents Region, 11-24 and 25-30.

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Norwegian Foreign Ministry. Nor does it mean that individuals were unimportant during this stage of the regime formation process. It is apparent, for example, that interactions between Esko Rajakoski of Finland and Dagfinn Stenseth of Norway made a marked difference in the acceptance of environmental protection in the Arctic as a bona fide agenda item at the international level. And of course, the Norwegian Initiative regarding the Barents Region would have been stillborn without the willingness of Thorvald Stoltenberg, the Norwegian foreign minister, to embrace the initiative as an expression of the functionalist approach to international cooperation and to put his weight behind the idea.21 Yet these details do nothing to change the fact that the emergence of the AEPS and the BEAR on the international political agenda were results of interstate processes. Given the growing chorus of voices proclaiming the dawning of the age of nonstate actors and global civil society,22 it is noteworthy that states—including small states such as Finland and Norway—continue to occupy the driver's seat, at least in connection with constellations of issues like those associated with the AEPS and the BEAR. These creation stories shed light as well on recent debates about the relationship between cognitive forces and state interests in the pursuit of international cooperation. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that policymakers working on the AEPS and the BEAR already had a good grasp of the fundamental interests of their states during the stage of agenda formation. In the case of the AEPS, American concern about radioactive contamination and oil spills in the Arctic, Canadian concern about the well-being of Arctic wildlife, and Finnish concern about transboundary fluxes of airborne pollutants originating from the Kola Peninsula were all clear and perfectly understandable in terms of national interests. Similarly, in the case of the BEAR, the Norwegian concern about the political vacuum emerging in northern Europe and the Russian concern about developing a new relationship with the Nordic states were straightforward expressions of national interests. Yet this does not mean that cognitive forces were unimportant in the emergence of these issues on the international political agenda. In some cases, the role of cognitive forces centered on the dissemination of factual information leading to an intensification of concern about old issues or a growing awareness of new issues. The realization that sulfur dioxide might 21. On the functionalist and neofunctionalist perspectives on international relations, see David Mitrany, A Working Peace System, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966; and Haas, Beyond the Nation State. 22. See, for example, Ronnie Lipschutz, "Restructuring World Politics: The Emergence of Global Civil Society," Millennium 21 (Winter 1992): 389-420.

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damage Finland's northern forests and the publicizing of Soviet practices involving the disposal of nuclear reactors and radioactive wastes in the Barents and Kara Seas exemplify this phenomenon. In other cases, the impact of cognitive forces went beyond the level of spreading information to make a deeper impact by guiding visions or interpretive frameworks. The emergence of the idea of the Arctic Eight during the late 1980s illustrates this phenomenon; this development surely owes at least as much to the rise of the Arctic as an organizing concept in policymaking circles as it does to the dissemination of new facts. Much the same is true of the emergence of the Barents Region as an organizing concept. The force of cognitive developments is particularly striking in this case because the adoption of a new organizing concept could not occur without overcoming entrenched opposition on the part of those still wedded to Atlanticist constructs.23 What this suggests is that any attempt to treat interests and cognitive forces as alternative sources of behavior in situations of this kind is misleading.24 Interests are real, but their expression in specific situations is affected not only by factual information but also by the organizing concepts policymakers adopt in thinking about the placement of items on the international political agenda. Finally, these cases yield several insights regarding the role of issue linkages in the emergence of items on the international political agenda.25 The case of the Finnish Initiative is a story of the role of conscious efforts to unlink issues in order to make progress. In framing their initiative, the Finns quickly learned of the concurrent effort to form an International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) and of the need to differentiate their initiative from this effort in order to avoid alienating those who had been working diligently to create the IASC since 1986.26 Additionally, it soon became clear that the original intention of casting this initiative in the popular language of sustainable development would be unacceptable to several key players, including the United States, due to the tendency of sustainable development to spill over into other issue areas. Presenting the issue as a matter of environmental protection had the virtues of suggesting marine Komsomolets in the Barents Sea served to confirm the reality of en24. For an account of the evolution of the international ozone regime that seeks to make such a separation, see Karen T. Litfin, Ozone Discourses: Science and Politics in Global Environmental Cooperation, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, esp. chap. 2. 25. Sebenius, "Negotiation Arithmetic." 26. For a treatment of the issues involved in the AEPS/IASC link, see Franklyn Griffiths and Oran R. Young, "Protecting the Arctic's Environment—Impressions of the CoChairs from the Third Session of the Working Group on Arctic International Relations," 22-27 January 1990, Institute of Arctic Studies, Dartmouth College, 1990.

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a relatively well-defined initiative that could complement cooperation in the field of scientific research while, at the same time, addressing the core concerns on the Finns' own agenda. The story of the BEAR, by contrast, is a study in linking issues; those who promoted the Norwegian Initiative deliberately sought to link a number of issues together. It is unlikely that the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, or the growth of the EU, treated as separate issues, would have provided the impetus needed to overcome existing mindsets and win converts to the realignment of thinking about northern Europe implicit in the concept of the Barents Region. But taken together, these developments add up to a sea change with geopolitical implications of sufficient magnitude to justify a reexamination of fundamental assumptions about the political significance of northern Europe. Overall, then, the evidence from these cases confirms the importance of issue linkages in the processes leading to the inscription of new items on the international political agenda. But whether the emphasis will fall on unlinking issues that may appear to be related or linking issues that are not obviously part of the same package will depend on the circumstances surrounding individual cases. Framing the Issues The process of inscribing an issue on the international political agenda has significant implications for the way in which it is framed for purposes of policymaking. There could be no doubt, for instance, that the AEPS would center on environmental matters of immediate concern to states with jurisdictions extending into the Circumpolar North. Similarly, the central concern of the BEAR with inventing a distinct regional identity for northern Europe was clear from the beginning. But even at this basic level, the participants had ample room to maneuver regarding the characterization of the AEPS and the BEAR as international political issues. In the case of the AEPS, there was the question of whether the Finnish Initiative would take shape as a matter of sustainable development or environmental protection. Although the distinction between these two broad and somewhat ill-defined themes may not seem critical at first glance, it became politically significant in this case due to the reluctance of some key actors, including the United States, to accept the broader concept of sustainable development on the grounds that it could provide a hunting license for interested parties to intervene in every Arctic issue of any consequence. For its part, the BEAR was subject to divergent interpretations on the part of those who considered it a stimulus to economic development and those

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who treated it as an arrangement dealing with environmental protection. Even more fundamental ambiguity involving the BEAR arose from the analytical difficulties surrounding the concept of regions at the international level27 as well as from practical difficulties associated with the emerging vision of a Europe of Regions and with Finnish sensitivities regarding the relationship between the preexisting concept of the North Calotte and the Norwegian concept of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region.28 Although the political motivation underlying the BEAR was clear enough, the core concept on which the Norwegian Initiative rested was sufficiently ill-defined to allow for a variety of interpretations. Turning from these general considerations to the more focused task of fleshing out the content of issues that make their way onto the international political agenda, the AEPS and the BEAR present us with two distinct developmental patterns, each of which appears to be common in international society. The AEPS is a classic example of framing through a process of assembling separate pieces from a variety of sources into an integrated package. While the political attractions of this pattern are selfevident, a process of this sort runs the risk of producing an incoherent or internally inconsistent result. The BEAR, by contrast, is a striking example of framing through a process in which a leading participant articulates a coherent and well-defined vision and then attempts to sell it to others. The politics of this pattern are just the opposite of those exemplified by the case of the AEPS. The obvious attractions of working with a coherent plan will often be offset by the political difficulty of persuading others to sign onto a vision developed by someone else. To pursue this distinction in greater depth, it is useful to consider some obvious contrasts in the framing of the AEPS and the BEAR and the political dynamics that produced them. The AEPS is circumpolar in scope, whereas the BEAR is focused on northern Europe, or what we now call the Euro-Arctic. The AEPS deals exclusively with matters of environmental protection; the BEAR covers a broad range of functional concerns (with the conspicuous exception of security). The AEPS encompasses both 27. For a variety of perspectives on regions in international society, see Ivar B. Neumann, "A Region-Building Approach to Northern Europe," Review of International Studies 20 (January 1994): 53-74; Kaisa Lahteenmaki and Jyrki Kakonen, "Regionalization and Its Impact on the Theory of International Relations," paper prepared for the annual convention of the International Studies Association, March-April 1994; and, more generally, the essays collected in Louise Fawcett and Andrew Hurrell, eds., Regionalism in World Politics: Regional Organization and International Order, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 28. Jyrki Kakonen, "Perspectives on Environment, State and Civil Society: The Arctic in Transition," Research Program on Environmental Policy and Society, Uppsala and Linkoping Universities, Research Report No. 5, 1994.

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marine and terrestrial concerns; the BEAR avoids marine issues, at least in formal terms. The BEAR establishes a relatively elaborate set of organizations to carry out its mission, while the AEPS minimizes the creation of new organizations. The AEPS is clearly the product of an early effort to seize the opportunity to achieve international cooperation in the Arctic afforded by the winding down of the Cold War and the opening of Russia to circumpolar initiatives. Promoters undoubtedly saw the confining of the initiative to matters of environmental protection as a strategy that would maximize the probability of scoring an early success in this campaign.29 Yet within this concentration on environmental concerns, the AEPS was framed so as to satisfy a number of distinct constituencies. The emphasis on monitoring and assessment, with its focus on transboundary fluxes, was a matter of priority to Norwegians and other Scandinavians familiar with the approach embodied in the LRTAP experience. The concern for preventing and responding to environmental emergencies was essential to persuading the Americans to participate in the AEPS. The inclusion of issues relating to the conservation of flora and fauna was a matter of particular interest to the Canadians. The prospect of gaining western assistance in dealing with environmental problems through the agency of the AEPS became a magnet for the Russians. Understandable as it may be in political terms, the framing of the AEPS as an initiative designed to deal with a collection of environmental concerns arising within the Arctic proper was not without costs, especially following the breakup of the Soviet Union and the emergence of its constituent republics as independent states. The Arctic focus makes it difficult to deal with linkages between Arctic systems and global environmental processes (e.g., ozone depletion and climate change) likely to affect the Arctic in a variety of ways.30 This focus also complicates efforts to deal with sources of airborne or waterborne pollutants reaching the Arctic that are located outside the geographical domain of the regime.31 Similarly, the framing of the AEPS as an environmental protection agreement makes it harder to address the impacts of industrial activities (both within and outside the Arctic) on 29. Franklyn Griffiths and Oran R. Young, "Impressions of the Co-Chairs—First Session of the Working Group on Arctic International Relations," 20-22 July 1988, Institute of Arctic Studies, Dartmouth College, 1988. 30. To be fair, those who framed the AEPS assumed that issues like ozone depletion and climate change would be dealt with adequately in other settings. But the difficulty in making effective links between regional and global concerns is one of the drawbacks of a regional approach to environmental protection. 31. On sources and pathways of air pollution in the Arctic, for example, see Stonehouse, ed., Arctic Air Pollution.

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environmental quality in the Arctic than would be the case with a broader orientation toward sustainable development. Because decisions about the relevant industrial activities are typically made by decisionmakers who are far removed from the Arctic and who are relatively insensitive to the impacts of their actions on Arctic systems, this is a matter of considerable importance.32 This is not to denigrate the achievement represented by the establishment of the AEPS. But it does serve to remind us that the politics of framing exhibits a dynamic of its own that may differ substantially from the logic of those concerned with the underlying problems themselves. Similar observations are in order regarding the framing of the BEAR. Given the overriding concern with the shifting political architecture of Europe, the effort to create a multidimensional region emphasizing the integration of Russia into northern Europe is entirely understandable. But the details of this effort posed a number of significant problems. The concept of a European Arctic made sense for those concerned with the position of the Nordic countries in relation to an expanding European Union. But it required recasting or subordinating the Finnish approach to an initiative known as Adjacent Areas Cooperation in the North Calotte, and it raised fears in the minds of some about the danger that the expansion of the EU to include some or all of the Nordic countries would make this region a periphery of a periphery.33 Similarly, while the avoidance of marine issues is easy to understand in terms of the sensitivity of the Barents Sea as a zone of operations for strategic weapons systems and in terms of the Norwegian desire to exclude the Svalbard Archipelago from the scope of the BEAR, this way of framing the issue makes little sense in functional terms. Many of the key environmental and economic problems in the region, including the threat posed by the spread of nuclear contamination, the challenge of managing marine fisheries, and the tradeoffs involved in developing offshore hydrocarbons, cannot be addressed sensibly in the absence of an explicit concern for marine systems.34 Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that the BEAR as it has evolved in practice involves a certain sleight of hand in which the marine areas are set aside from the domain of the region in geographical terms but the functional scope of the regime is spelled out in a way that makes the consideration of marine issues unavoidable. 32. Oran R. Young and F. Stuart Chapin III, "Anthropogenic Impacts on Biodiversity in the Arctic," in F. Stuart Chapin III and C. Korner, eds., Arctic and Alpine Biodiversity: Patterns, Causes and Ecosystem Consequences, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1995. 33. Kakonen, "Perspectives on Environment, State and Civil Society." 34. Stokke, "Environmental Cooperation," Alf Hakon Hoel, "The Barents Sea: Fisheries Resources for Europe and Russia," and Arild Moe, "Oil and Gas: Future Role of the Barents Region," in Stokke and Tunander, eds., The Barents Region, 115-30 and 131-44.

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One way to get around such concerns—an approach clearly exemplified in the framing of the BEAR—is to focus attention on the establishment of processes rather than on precise delineations of geographical and functional coverage or on specific regulative provisions. Thus, the framers of the BEAR placed considerable emphasis on the creation of the Barents Council and the Regional Council, on the assumption that these mechanisms would be able to arrive at de facto answers to questions about matters of geographical and functional coverage whose resolution might have proved intractable in connection with the formation of this international regime. This well-known technique for handling difficult issues has much to recommend it in situations like that confronting the framers of the BEAR. Yet it is also a risky strategy, particularly in situations where several organizations are being created, the interests of the participants in the different organizations are quite distinct, and the division of authority between the organizations is far from clear. As in the case of the AEPS, then, the framing of the BEAR exhibits a dynamic that makes perfectly good political sense but that raises significant questions when it comes to dealing with the underlying issue. Despite the striking differences outlined in the preceding paragraphs, the AEPS and the BEAR exhibit several important similarities with regard to framing. Both initiatives were conceptualized by the key players as relatively conventional interstate arrangements. Both emerged as programmatic—in contrast to regulative or procedural—initiatives intended to set in motion a series of activities that would improve the understanding of the participants regarding the issues at stake and trigger a process of continuing institutional development or expansion over time. Both were deliberately cast as relatively open-ended arrangements intended to provide ample opportunity for evolution with the passage of time rather than as fully articulated or self-contained solutions to well-defined problems. These similarities in the framing of the AEPS and the BEAR undoubtedly reflect some common features of the processes involved in the development of these initiatives as well as some commonalities in the nature of the underlying problems they address. Given the prominent role of the Finnish Foreign Ministry in framing the AEPS and the dominant role of the Norwegian Foreign Ministry in framing the BEAR, for example, it is no accident that the two initiatives feature interstate arrangements. At the same time, the facts that the Cold War had accentuated the role of states in the Arctic throughout much of the postwar era and that NGOs (with the partial exception of indigenous peoples' organizations) had played little role in the Arctic for some time at the international level surely con-

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tributed to the interstate character of the AEPS and the BEAR. Similar observations are in order regarding the casting of the AEPS and the BEAR as programmatic arrangements. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that experience with arrangements like LRTAP had a significant effect in shaping the thinking of those—especially the Nordics—who played influential roles in framing the AEPS and the BEAR. Yet it is also clear that the appeal of programmatic arrangements for environmental protection in the Arctic as a whole and for the development of an integrative arrangement in northern Europe was unambiguous. In both cases, circumstances on the ground were changing rapidly, the nature of the problem to be solved was far from clear-cut, and the opportunities for guiding the evolution of emerging relationships seemed substantial. Creating regimes offered a creative response to these circumstances. But there was little point in either case in pursuing a strategy that would take the problem as a given and focus exclusively on working out regulative arrangements to solve it. As in the preceding discussion of the process of getting onto the agenda, this account of the factors involved in shaping the characterization of the AEPS and the BEAR suggests some crosscutting observations about the political dynamic involved in the framing of issues at the international level. To begin with, it is clear that ideas count more because they create agendas where none previously existed than because they induce important actors to redefine their interests. In the cases at hand, this was not a matter of bringing technical or scientific expertise to bear on newly emerging problems. The technical ideas underlying the AEPS (e.g., transboundary fluxes of pollutants, critical loads) were largely derived from recent European experience; there was no call for technical innovation in conceptualizing the BEAR. Rather, it was the idea of treating the Arctic— and with it the Arctic Eight—as a distinct region in policy terms in the case of the AEPS and the idea of defining northern Europe, an area until recently split by the Cold War, as a politically relevant region in the case of the BEAR that changed the terms of the discourse in efforts to devise cooperative arrangements. Needless to say, the consequences of these discursive shifts were not equally appealing to all parties concerned.35 The United States with its strong commitment to global perspectives, for example, was initially unenthusiastic about accepting the Arctic as a policy relevant region requiring consideration on its own terms. Similarly, Finland, with its attachment to the idea of the North Calotte, was not initially happy with the Norwegian concept of a Barents Euro-Arctic Region 35. For an extended discussion of the phenomenon of discursive shift illustrated with an account of the creation of the ozone regime, see Litfin, Ozone Discourses.

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whose political significance was both different from and ultimately at odds with the political program associated with the North Calotte.36 What is interesting in both cases is the gathering of a powerful momentum around these cognitive constructs. With regard to the AEPS, both the Soviet Union and the United States initially resisted the idea of what we now know and increasingly take for granted as the Arctic of the Arctic Eight. The push for this idea was led by Finland and to a somewhat lesser extent by Canada. In the case of the BEAR, Finland was resistant, and the other Nordic states did not see themselves as having significant stakes in the matter. Yet Norway persuasively presented the case for adopting the idea of this region as an organizing political construct. There is more to be learned about the circumstances under which politically potent constructs of this sort emerge and the factors that determine their fate. It is clear from the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR that this phenomenon cannot be accounted for entirely in terms of the distribution of power in the material or structural sense. Nor is it a matter to be explained in terms of the activities of epistemic communities as that notion has been developed and employed by students of environmental regimes.37 Rather, the phenomenon centers on the processes through which organizing concepts arise and diffuse within policymaking communities—processes that we do not understand well at this juncture.38 What we do know is that such developments generally do not occur without a struggle. In this connection, the cases at hand illustrate two distinct processes leading to the shifting of organizing constructs, or what we might regard as political paradigms. In the case of the BEAR, the crucial battle took place within the Norwegian Foreign Ministry between those whose outlook had been shaped in large measure by the experience of the Cold War and those who perceived a need for a fundamental realignment of policy to come to terms with the changing political architecture of Europe. The resolution of this battle required the personal intervention of the foreign minister and the reassignment of a number of those who were on the losing side.39 But once the Norwegian position became clear, the diffusion of the idea of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region emerged as a top 36. During 1991 and 1992, Finland gave priority to developing a program known as Adjacent Areas Cooperation and administered by the North Calotte Committee under the auspices of the Nordic Council of Ministers. The central concern of this project, which shunned the larger political concerns associated with the Norwegian Initiative, was to assist those concerned with promoting economic and political transitions in the Kola Peninsula. 37. Peter M. Haas, "Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination," International Organization 46 (Winter 1992): 1-35. 38. Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. 39. Kvistad, "The Barents Spirit," 88-91.

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priority on the foreign minister's agenda in his dealings with counterparts in the other countries of the region. Thus, Stoltenberg's ability to enlist Kozyrev in this project and ultimately to win over Paavo Vayrynen of Finland played a crucial role in the diffusion of the political paradigm symbolized by the idea of the BEAR. The analogous process in the case of the AEPS was markedly different. The Finns did not have a programmatic vision for the Arctic delineated in ecosystem terms, and the Finnish Initiative did not become a personal priority for Paavo Vayrynen, the Finnish foreign minister, in the way that the BEAR did for Stoltenberg. Rather, the Finnish Initiative appears to have acted as a trigger that crystallized a conceptual development that had been percolating to the surface in many quarters over a period of several years. It was, in effect, a creative spark that ignited a simultaneous conceptual development in a number of quarters, in contrast to the organized campaign that Stoltenberg waged on behalf of the BEAR. As these observations suggest, both the impact of contextual developments and the interventions of key individuals are significant factors in the political dynamic associated with developments like the emergence of the Arctic and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region as politically potent constructs. It goes without saying that macro-level developments such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, or the expansion of the European Union are powerful forces in these terms. But so are more circumscribed events like the Chernobyl accident, the wreck of the Exxon Valdez, or the publicizing of Soviet practices regarding the disposal of radioactive wastes, especially when it comes to the perceptual and cognitive shifts explored in this discussion of the framing of the AEPS and the BEAR. Yet these contextual forces do not operate in a vacuum. In many cases, they are picked up, interpreted, and disseminated by nonstate actors, like environmental groups or groups representing economic interests. For reasons set forth earlier, this mechanism was of limited significance in the case of the BEAR and confined largely to the activities of organizations like the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and the Saami Council in the case of the AEPS. Perhaps for this reason, the roles played by a few key individuals, such as Stoltenberg in the case of the BEAR, loom particularly large in the political dynamic surrounding the emergence of the cognitive constructs that gave shape to the AEPS and the BEAR as coherent policy enterprises. Moving to the Front Burner Like its counterparts in other settings, the international political agenda is always congested. Therefore, the fact that an issue makes its way onto this

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agenda with sufficient focus to be actionable offers no guarantee that the matter will rise to a high enough level on the agenda to trigger the expenditure of political capital needed to move it forward in the overall policy process. With regard to the formation of international regimes, the issue at stake here is the achievement of sufficient momentum to graduate to the stage of explicit negotiations regarding the provisions of the institutional arrangements to be created. The creation stories of the AEPS and the BEAR suggest two major conclusions about the processes through which specific issues move to the front burner of the international political agenda. The presence of a determined champion appears to be necessary to the development of political momentum. But the efforts of a champion alone are not sufficient to guarantee success in this realm. The cases suggest that this occurs when the champion is able to enlist the support of one or more additional players to form a coalition prepared to push the issues vigorously. The identity of Finland as the champion of the AEPS and of Norway as the champion of the BEAR is not in doubt. A number of additional observations about the role champions play in such processes emerge from an examination of these cases. Why did Finland and Norway assume the role of champion? As I have already suggested, both states had well-defined interests that provided them with strong incentives to embrace this role. But a simple interest-based explanation does not tell the whole story of the behavior of Finland in connection with the AEPS and the behavior of Norway in connection with the BEAR. What is needed to flesh out these creation stories is some reference to policy cultures and especially the roles of individuals as leaders in the effort to push states to become champions at the international level. Thus, the Finnish Initiative should be understood, at least in part, as an expression of Finland's familiar postwar role as a conduit for western ideas to enter Soviet thinking and for Soviet concerns to make their way to western audiences. The Norwegian Initiative, by contrast, is interesting precisely because it required a significant reorientation of the preexisting policy culture of the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. In fact, the emergence of Norway as the champion for the BEAR involved new thinking of a sort so far-reaching that it could only be achieved by reassigning a number of key individuals within the Foreign Ministry. The contrast between Rajakoski and Stoltenberg as individual leaders is also instructive in this connection.40 The leadership of Rajakoski, a midlevel official in the Finnish Foreign Ministry, was largely entrepreneurial in 40. For a general account of the role of political leadership in regime formation, see Young, "Political Leadership."

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nature. Jaakko Blomberg, the undersecretary for political affairs, was the conceptualizer who worked out the political calculations underlying the Finnish Initiative. Rajakoski, on the other hand, emerged as a tireless entrepreneur promoting the Finnish proposal in policy circles throughout the circumpolar world. In this effort, he was less concerned about the shape or content of the AEPS than about moving forward with some sort of environmental initiative for the Arctic. However, as a political entrepreneur seeking to make deals and forge coalitions with counterparts in other Arctic states, he was indefatigable. Stoltenberg, by contrast, was able to use his position as foreign minister to provide intellectual leadership both within Norwegian policymaking circles and in his dealings with counterparts in Russia and Finland. In this connection, the fact that Stoltenberg's vision was rooted in the logic of functionalism as well as in concerns of a more geopolitical character regarding the shifting constellation of forces in Europe is clearly significant. Given the innovative character of the BEAR and the need to overcome opposition to what became the Norwegian Initiative at home, it is hard to overestimate the importance of Stoltenberg's role in moving the BEAR from the status of a controversial proposal being pushed by some within his own Foreign Ministry to the status of a priority item on the international political agenda in northern Europe. It is worth pausing here as well to note that the champions of the AEPS and the BEAR were not great powers. It would be difficult to make a case for describing Finland and Norway even as issue-area hegemons, much less as overall great powers, without distorting this concept beyond recognition. What is more, these champions—especially Finland in the case of the AEPS—had to overcome disinterest and, in some cases, resistance on the part of others, including states more powerful than themselves. It may be that this testifies to the significance of intensity of interest in contrast to the possession of structural power as a basis for successful action in the realm of agenda formation. It may also have something to do with the fact that the proposals in question focused on programmatic arrangements in contrast to regulative or procedural regimes. Be this as it may, the evidence from these cases regarding the ability of small states to emerge as effective champions during the stage of agenda formation is suggestive. It will be interesting to ask whether this phenomenon carries over into the stages of negotiation and operationalization as we continue to explore the creation stories of the AEPS and the BEAR in the chapters to come.41 41. On the complications afflicting the idea of power in the structural or material sense in connection with the analysis of regime formation, see Young, International Governance, chap. 5.

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Of course, efforts to move issues like the AEPS and the BEAR up the international political agenda involve the building of coalitions. The recent literature on regime formation draws a distinction of some importance between initiators or boosters and laggards in examining the political dynamics of this process.42 It has also addressed cases (e.g., Germany with regard to transboundary air pollution in Europe) in which laggards have changed their posture to become boosters with considerable impact on the process of regime formation.43 But the cases under consideration here suggest the importance of adding another dimension to our understanding of the process through which issues move toward the front burner of the political agenda. In effect, states that act as champions of particular issues often seek to enlist others not as co-champions but as supporters who are willing to serve as coalition partners in efforts to put pressure on laggards to accept or at least not to oppose actively the movement of issues toward the top of the political agenda. In the case of the AEPS, the key development in this realm appears to have been the cultivation of Norwegian support for the initiative during the winter and spring of 1989. Whereas Canada and Russia were disposed to support the Finnish Initiative from the beginning, the Norwegian policy community was split between those in the Environment Ministry who were favorably inclined and those in the Foreign Ministry who were openly skeptical of the premises underlying the AEPS. In this connection, the successful effort to persuade the Foreign Ministry of the value of an environmental monitoring and assessment program for the Arctic and of the prospect that Norway could assume a leadership role in this area played a crucial part in swinging Norway into line as a supporter of the Finnish Initiative. Among other things, this shift served to reduce support among the Arctic Eight for the outspoken resistance of the United States to the growing momentum of the Finnish Initiative during the months leading up to the Rovaniemi meeting in September 1989. The parallel story in the case of the BEAR is even more straightforward. The Norwegians made a concerted and successful attempt to interest the Russians in the idea of international cooperation in northern Europe. Russia joined the coalition as a supporter; hence, the Norwegian Initiative did not become the Norwegian/Russian Initiative.44 But the combined interest of Norway and Russia in this project made it inevitable that the Finns 42. Detlef Sprinz and Tapani Vaahtoranta, "The Interest-Based Explanation of International Environmental Policy," International Organization 48 (Winter 1994): 77-105. 43. Levy, "European Acid Rain," 75-132. 44. Pavel K. Baev, "Russian Perspectives on the Barents Region," in Stokke and Tunander, eds., The Barents Region, 175-86.

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would join the fold, whatever their concern about the implications of this initiative for the idea of the North Calotte and the long-standing efforts of the North Calotte Committee operating under the auspices of the Nordic Council of Ministers to address regional concerns in northern Fennoscandia. As a result, the BEAR moved toward the top of the political agenda with remarkable speed during the early months of 1992. Not surprisingly, there are stories of leadership on the part of key individuals associated with these efforts at coalition building. In the case of the AEPS, the crucial development involved an increasingly productive dialogue between Esko Rajakoski, the Finnish entrepreneur, and Dagfinn Stenseth, the Norwegian Foreign Ministry official in charge of the Department of Northern Areas and Regional Questions. Stenseth, in contrast to Rolf Trolle Andersen, the Foreign Ministry's Polar Advisor, adopted a cautiously receptive attitude toward the idea of international cooperation regarding environmental concerns in the Arctic.45 Specifically, Stenseth played an important role in the developing Norwegian interest in the monitoring and assessment component of the AEPS and, in the process, in the crafting of a distinctive role for Norway that not only found its way into the final provisions of the strategy but that also has continued to grow during the period since the adoption of the June 1991 ministerial declaration. For its part, the BEAR was propelled forward on the political agenda through the successful efforts of Stoltenberg to draw Andrei Kozyrev, the Russian foreign minister, into his vision of the European Arctic as a suitable arena for the application of functionalist ideas regarding international cooperation. In this connection, it is interesting to note that by the time of the December 1993 Russian parliamentary elections, Kozyrev's association with the BEAR had become so strong that he chose to stand for election from Murmansk.46 Here again, we see a complex relationship arising between the actions of states as the formal participants in regime formation and the roles of key individuals as the actors ultimately responsible for interpreting the interests of states in specific contexts and building the coalitions needed to move issues like the AEPS and the BEAR toward the top of the international political agenda. As in the earlier sections of this chapter, the stories I have recounted in the preceding paragraphs are focused on interstate relations. But what of the role of nonstate actors, like the environmental groups that played such a prominent role in moving the issue of environmental protection in the Antarctic to the top of the international political agenda at the same 45. Although Stenseth shared some of the skepticism of others in the Foreign Ministry, he had been Norwegian ambassador to the Soviet Union and had a better understanding of the political calculus underlying the Finnish Initiative than many of his colleagues. 46. Stokke and Tunander, "Introduction."

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time that the AEPS was emerging in the north polar region?47 There is surprisingly little to report regarding the efforts of nonstate actors to push the AEPS and the BEAR upward on the international agenda. It is hard to find any evidence of the existence of an epistemic community in either of these cases. Environmental groups, which have since become actively involved in Arctic issues,48 did not become influential players during the stage of agenda formation with regard to either of these issues. The stories do not involve concerted efforts on the part of industry groups to accelerate or retard the move toward international cooperation. A partial exception to this conclusion about the minimal role of nonstate actors involves the efforts of indigenous peoples, especially in the case of the AEPS.49 Throughout the 1980s, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC)—an organization representing the interests of aboriginal peoples in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, and Chukotka—devoted considerable attention to the development of a set of comprehensive policy principles for the Arctic.50 In 1986, the organization initiated work on the development of an Inuit Regional Conservation Strategy modeled on the World Conservation Strategy developed some years earlier by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (now the World Conservation Union). Because a number of individuals who later emerged as actors in the development of the AEPS played prominent roles in these activities, it is possible to argue that the efforts of the ICC to devise coherent policies for the Arctic helped to publicize the importance of environmental protection in the Circumpolar North. Still, it took an explicit initiative on the part of the Danish government to get the Inuit (and subsequently the Saami and the indigenous peoples of Russia) accepted as legitimate players in the development of the AEPS.51 If anything, the role of these nonstate actors seems even harder to identify in the case of the BEAR. It is true that those seeking to promote the concept of the Barents Region as a political construct emphasized the 47. On the role of environmental groups in promoting the issue of environmental protection in Antarctica, see Lorraine H. Elliott, International Environmental Politics: Protecting the Antarctic, New York: St. Martin's, 1994. 48. The Worldwide Fund for Nature, for example, has established a WWF—Arctic Programme and publishes a useful bulletin on Arctic issues at regular intervals. 49. Tennberg, "Environmental Cooperation," 70-87. 50. Chester Reimer, "Moving Toward Cooperation: Inuit Circumpolar Policies and the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy," Northern Perspectives 21 (Winter 1993-94): 22-26. 51. Danish leadership on this issue is undoubtedly attributable to the fact that Finn Lynge, a Greenlander working on Greenlandic issues at the Danish Foreign Ministry, and Hans Jakob Helms, a representative of the Greenland Home Rule office in Copenhagen, were both members of the Danish delegation at the September 1989 Rovaniemi meeting.

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transboundary activities of a variety of private groups in the area, including Saami herders, Pomor traders, and Norwegian and Russian fishers.52 For the most part, however, this was a matter of efforts on the part of public policymakers to build a case for accepting the BEAR as a distinctive region for policy purposes rather than of efforts on the part of these groups to intervene in the policy process in pursuit of their own interests. In accounting for the movement of the AEPS and the BEAR toward the top of the international political agenda, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that the processes in question were dominated by the actions of states. As I have indicated, this leaves ample room for the interplay of bureaucratic politics and the initiatives of individual leaders. But at least up to this point in the process, the creation stories of the AEPS and the BEAR do not involve featured roles for nonstate actors. Graduating to the Stage of Negotiation Movement to the front burner of the international political agenda is necessary for the process of regime formation to roll forward from the stage of agenda formation to the stage of negotiation. But this movement alone is not sufficient to ensure that the transition will occur. A number of factors can derail efforts to establish institutional arrangements before the onset of explicit negotiations. The outbreak of war or violent conflict at the international level can sidetrack an issue indefinitely. Civil strife or political transformation taking place within a key participant can have the effect of putting international initiatives on hold. Shifts in scientific understanding or in dominant political paradigms can lead to the redefinition of an issue before it reaches the stage of negotiation. Rather than taking the transition from agenda formation to negotiation for granted, therefore, it is important to look at this process closely and to identify factors that govern the transition. An examination of the events leading up to the 20-26 September 1989 meeting in Rovaniemi in the case of the AEPS and the 25 April 1992 meeting in Tromso in the case of the BEAR yields a number of observations about the determinants of this transition. There are, to begin with, the phenomena of triggers and inhibitors. Triggers are catalytic events, ordinarily occurring outside the process of regime formation per se, that play an instrumental role in moving this process from one stage to another. It is important not to exaggerate the role of triggers; they are not driving forces like material conditions, interests, or ideas. But they can become intervening variables that need to be taken 52. Tunander, "Inventing the Barents Region."

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into account in any effort to make sense of the creation stories of specific international regimes. As the AEPS and the BEAR make clear, triggers can take a variety of forms. In the case of the AEPS, the evidence suggests that the wreck of the Exxon Valdez during the last week of March 1989 gave a substantial boost to the Finnish effort to propel the Rovaniemi process into the stage of negotiation. Like the ozone hole, the Chernobyl accident, and, more recently, nuclear contamination and oil spills in the Russian North, the Exxon Valdez spill focused worldwide attention on the hazards associated with industrial development in the North and led to a rapid raising of public consciousness regarding the importance of environmental protection in the Arctic and Subarctic. From the perspective of regime formation, the significance of this event was heightened by the fact that the United States had been particularly resistant to the Finnish Initiative during 1988 and early 1989. Given the drama surrounding the wreck of the Exxon Valdez in Alaskan waters, it suddenly became more difficult for the United States to oppose an initiative that promised, among other things, to upgrade the capacity of all the Arctic states to prevent and respond to environmental emergencies. A very different type of trigger emerged in the case of the BEAR. On 9 April 1992, a group of ten Baltic states signed the Helsinki Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area, an agreement intended to expand and strengthen an earlier arrangement for the Baltic Sea dating back to 1974.53 The significance of this event for the BEAR lies not only in the demonstration effect arising from the achievement of success in the pursuit of international cooperation in a neighboring area but also, and perhaps more importantly, in the fact that the Baltic Sea case symbolized the rise of the concept of a Europe of Regions as a politically potent construct. Recent years have witnessed a striking increase of interest in transboundary regions in Europe, partly as a means of countering the growing influence of Brussels as the administrative center of the European Union and partly as a means of solving common problems in what are known as "frontier regions."54 Among the areas commonly viewed in these terms are the Alps-Adria Region, the New EuroRegion (otherwise known as the Black Triangle), the Baltic Sea Region, and the Barents Sea Region.55 Under the circumstances, significant developments in any one of these regions can be expected to energize those pushing for enhanced cooperation in other frontier regions, even though the 53. Kukk, Jervell, and Joenniemi, eds., The Baltic Sea Area. 54. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty contains explicit provisions for the establishment of a Committee of Regions. 55. Veggeland, "The Barents Region as a European Frontier Region."

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specific issues involved may vary substantially from case to case. What is more, the disposition of one case (e.g., the Baltic Sea Region) may lead policymakers concerned with other cases to conclude that their turn has come. Thus, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the signing of the Helsinki Convention on 9 April helped trigger the BEAR's transition to the negotiation stage during the Tromso meeting of 25 April. The role of inhibitors is just the opposite of that of triggers. They are events occurring outside the process of regime formation that have the effect of derailing or slowing down the process. What is striking about the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR is that obvious potential inhibitors did not materialize at the critical transition points. The year 1989, for example, was not a presidential election year in the United States. On the contrary, a president with acknowledged expertise in the realm of foreign affairs was securely in place during the first nine months of 1989 and not yet preoccupied with the events that led ultimately to the Gulf War during the winter of 1991. Similarly, the final collapse of the Soviet Union occurred just long enough before the transition to negotiations in the case of the BEAR for Boris Yeltsin to establish Russia as a sovereign state and for Russia to assume most of the international obligations taken on by the Soviet Union in earlier times. These matters of timing can be regarded as strokes of fortune from the point of view of efforts to form the AEPS and the BEAR. Because they are driven by other political dynamics, there is no way to control for the potential impacts of inhibitors in efforts to move the formation process forward for specific regimes, like the AEPS and the BEAR. But as these cases make clear, the occurrence of one or more outside triggers coupled with the absence of outside inhibitors can go a long way toward explaining a successful transition from agenda formation to explicit negotiations with regard to specific instances of regime formation. Beyond this, there is the phenomenon commonly described as political momentum among students of electoral or legislative politics at the domestic level. Although momentum is difficult to measure empirically, it is prized by political leaders who understand that nothing succeeds like success and who expend considerable energy to keep balls rolling. In these terms, the AEPS and the BEAR offer a study in contrasts. Having expended a good deal of political capital during 1991 and early 1992 on the battle over the adoption of the Barents Region as an organizing concept for Norwegian foreign policy, Stoltenberg was in need of external validation of the assumptions underlying this reorientation in Norwegian policy. Under the circumstances, he lost no time enlisting the support of Kozyrev for the Barents Region project and organizing the 25 April meeting in Tromso, which marked the transition to the stage of negotiation.

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The result was a remarkably fast-paced sequence of events that generated sufficient momentum to carry the process all the way through to the successful conclusion of the Kirkenes ministerial meeting in January 1993. In the case of the AEPS, by contrast, political momentum was much more difficult to generate. In the end, this difficulty did not prevent the transition that occurred in conjunction with the September 1989 meeting in Rovaniemi. But it did slow the pace of this development, frustrating the entrepreneurial Rajakoski but yielding a perfectly satisfactory result for those, like the Americans, who were in no hurry to move toward the consideration of specific provisions suitable for inclusion in a ministerial declaration or a more detailed strategy document. Finally, these creation stories offer revealing evidence regarding the role of diplomatic etiquette in moving the process of regime formation forward from the stage of agenda formation to the stage of negotiations. The case of the BEAR requires no further explanation along these lines. Political leaders at the highest level—the foreign ministers of Norway, Russia, and Finland—simply communicated with each other directly and agreed that the process should go forward. Under the circumstances, there was little likelihood that others would oppose the onset of negotiations in the aftermath of the Tromso meeting. The case of the AEPS—where the leaders were lower-level officials and where there was unmistakable opposition to the initiative in some quarters—is different. The success of the Finnish Initiative was by no means a foregone conclusion. In this context, the action of the Finnish Foreign Ministry in sending a formal letter on 12 January 1989 inviting the "governments of the seven other Arctic states to discuss the possibility of cooperation in Arctic environmental protection" proved significant.56 Others could and did procrastinate in the hope that the Finnish invitation would simply fade away. But given the basic norms of diplomatic etiquette, the Finnish invitation ultimately required an answer, and it would have been awkward to turn down the invitation without a compelling and publicly presentable reason for doing so. Certainly, the force of diplomatic etiquette is far less compelling than that of political momentum, and it does not dictate that participating states must send high-level representatives to meetings or prepare for them systematically. But it is hard to turn down an explicit invitation in a setting of this sort, and it is impossible to control the political dynamic that arises at the meeting itself. As a tactical maneuver, therefore, it seems fair to conclude that the Finnish invitation of 12 January played a role of some importance in 56. David A. Shakespeare, "The Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy: Predicting the Effectiveness of a Nascent Regime," Master's thesis, College of Marine Studies, University of Delaware, August 1992, 43.

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bringing about the meeting that began in Rovaniemi on 20 September 1989 and, in the process, in moving the Rovaniemi process from the stage of agenda formation to the stage of negotiation. The Political Dynamic of Agenda Formation What initial conclusions about the political dynamic of agenda formation can be drawn from the preceding account of the rise of the AEPS and the BEAR on the international political agenda? Power in the material or structural sense did not play a prominent role in the processes of agenda formation associated with these cases. With regard to the AEPS, the United States, anxious not to compromise its status as a global power, openly resisted the Finnish Initiative throughout the stage of agenda formation. For its part, the Soviet Union was not an initiator of this project, although the Soviets did support the Finnish effort. In the case of the BEAR, the Soviet Union/Russia, the nominal great power of northern Europe, was in turmoil during 1991-92; it was attracted to the Norwegian proposal in considerable part as a means of gaining direct access to the West in the aftermath of the Cold War, rather than as an opportunity to exercise its structural power. It is probably fair to conclude, in fact, that the Norwegians, who had long been wary of cooperative arrangements involving the Soviet Union/Russia, were encouraged to take the initiative in this instance by the weakened condition of Russia, which assumed the international obligations of the Soviet Union at the start of 1992. In essence, agenda formation in these cases is a tale of interactions between interests and ideas. The principal conclusion to be drawn from this tale is that interests and ideas are autonomous or independent factors that nonetheless interact in a complex manner to drive the process of agenda formation. In the case of the AEPS, the Finns were pursuing easily identifiable national interests in proposing a cooperative effort to deal with environmental problems in the Arctic. But in conjunction with the Finnish Initiative, the idea of the Arctic Eight acquired a momentum of its own that proved difficult for any of the individual Arctic states to resist. The case of the BEAR, by contrast, illustrates the problem of devising new means to pursue familiar interests in a rapidly changing political environment. Thus, Norway found itself in the well-known position of a small power seeking to secure its interests in a geopolitically sensitive area. But the combination of the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the expansion of the EU led senior Norwegian policymakers to conclude that Norway's familiar postwar foreign policy stance was no longer conducive to pursuing this goal. All of this casts doubt on efforts

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of reflectivist students of international regimes to subjectivize state interests.57 Yet it certainly does not vindicate the arguments of the (neo)realists about the dictates of objective state interests in international society.58 The main lesson to be drawn from this account concerns the need to focus hard on the interactions between interests and ideas and on the role of ideas in suggesting new ways to pursue familiar interests. There is no denying the conclusion that agenda formation in the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR was predominantly an interstate process. Despite the important role played by the evolution of ideas in these cases, it is difficult to discern evidence of the emergence of an epistemic community—a transnational group of experts who share a common view of the problem to be solved as well as a common prescription for its solution59— during the stage of agenda formation in either case. Rather, two other observations about players stand out in these stories. Individuals (e.g., Rajakoski and Stenseth in the case of the AEPS, and Stoltenberg and Kozyrev in the case of the BEAR) perform key roles in the process of agenda formation, but not because they operate in a political vacuum or take matters into their own hands. In these stories, individuals loomed large because of their ability to think through connections between national interests and specific circumstances and to find ways to sell the interpretations they reached to their counterparts at home and abroad. What this suggests is a need for greater sophistication in understanding the relationships between individuals and states or, for that matter, nonstate actors as players in international relations. Beyond this, the diffusion of ideas (e.g., the concepts of the Arctic Eight and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region) looms large as a factor influencing agenda formation in these cases.60 It would be simplistic to attribute this process to the conscious efforts of specific individuals or epistemic communities; the diffusion of ideas is surely a more subtle and less manipulable process than that. But there is ample evidence to suggest that individual leaders are often quick to take note of the diffusion of ideas and to incorporate them into the proposals they articulate in their efforts to create international regimes. In most formulations, the concept of collective action assumes welldefined interactive relationships in which actors face clear-cut options (e.g., 57. See, for example, Litfin, Ozone Discourses, esp. chap. 2. This is not to deny the relevance of the claim made in the agent-structure debate to the effect that the character of a social system is a major determinant of the interests of its members. See Alexander Wendt, "The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations," International Organization 41 (Summer 1987): 335-70. 58. For a range of perspectives on this topic, see Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 59. Haas, "Introduction." 60. Goldstein and Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy.

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the choice between defection and cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma) and combinations of choices yield predictable outcomes.61 This suggests that propositions about collective action will be difficult to apply to processes of agenda formation where the character of the problem to be addressed—much less the options available to the players and the outcomes flowing from combinations of choices—is up for grabs. Yet this certainly does not mean that we can ignore the dangers of collectively undesirable consequences arising from individualistic behavior on the part of participants in these processes. If anything, the scope for misunderstanding and, therefore, failure to reap joint gains or to avoid joint losses is even greater during the stage of agenda formation. Because they all know perfectly well, as Riker put it, that "agendas foreshadow outcomes," participants in such processes routinely seek to persuade others to adopt their own way of thinking about the problem during the stage of agenda formation. Although the AEPS and the BEAR are cases in which the efforts of the parties to reach agreement on the shape of the agenda were crowned with success, there are many cases in which failure to reach agreement at the stage of agenda formation dooms efforts to create international regimes before they can be properly launched. The label collective-discourse problems could be used to differentiate this phenomenon from the more familiar collective-action problems while at the same time suggesting that the two phenomena have much in common. There can be no doubt about the role of macro-level contextual factors as determinants of the process of agenda formation. Gorbachev's reforms in the case of the AEPS and the collapse of the Soviet Union coupled with the ending of the Cold War in the case of the BEAR were undoubtedly necessary for agenda formation to go forward in these cases. But the stories recounted in this chapter suggest that micro-level contextual factors can also play a role of some importance in agenda formation, and for two reasons. Specific events such as the wreck of the Exxon Valdez can produce the sharp shocks needed to break down resistance to the movement of an issue like environmental protection in the Arctic toward the top of the international political agenda. Such events also appear to play a significant role in the realm of consciousness raising or, in other words, in the process through which new ideas or ways of thinking diffuse in international society. A sharp shock of this sort can, in effect, breach barriers to new thinking and lead to the rapid spread of ideas that have been waiting in the wings for some time. Prior to the wreck of the Exxon Valdez, for example, proposals dealing with emergency prevention and response evoked only 61. For a sophisticated account of theories of collective action or interactive decisionmaking, consult Hardin, Collective Action.

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moderate interest in discussions of the need to improve environmental protection in the Arctic. In the aftermath of this event, however, everyone acknowledged the importance of addressing this problem, or at least of including it on the active agenda for international negotiations. Naturally, this should not be construed as any guarantee of the ability of the Arctic Eight to devise effective institutional arrangements dealing with emergency prevention and response in the Arctic. But at the level of agenda formation, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this specific event made a substantial difference. A striking conclusion of this account of the emergence of the AEPS and the BEAR on the international political agenda is that the process of agenda formation can significantly constrain the use of bargaining tactics during the negotiations that follow. Once the AEPS was framed as a matter of environmental protection in the Circumpolar North, for example, there was little prospect of introducing additional functional concerns or redrawing the geographical boundaries of the Finnish Initiative to address problems associated with institutional bargaining.62 Much the same can be said of the framing of the Norwegian Initiative as a plan to promote cooperation in a number of functional areas within a region defined to include both northern Fennoscandia and northwestern Russia. There is little evidence to suggest that these constraints ordinarily result from conscious efforts on the part of those engaged in agenda formation. But this in no way detracts from the significance of such constraints when it comes time to make the transition from the stage of agenda formation to the stage of negotiation. At the same time, it is worth asking whether there are tactics peculiar to the stage of agenda formation in contrast to the more familiar bargaining tactics associated with the stage of negotiation. There can be no doubt that those engaged in agenda formation often do look ahead to later stages in the process of regime formation and seek to frame their initiatives with an eye toward minimizing problems likely to arise during these later stages. The willingness of the Finns to frame the AEPS as a matter of environmental protection rather than sustainable development, for example, undoubtedly owes much to their expectations about the political dynamic of the negotiation stage. Similar observations can be made about Norwegian tactics surrounding the role of marine issues in the BEAR initiative. Just as the process of agenda formation may serve to constrain institutional bargaining in ways that are unforeseen and unintended, clever players may also deliberately structure the process of agenda formation in ways that avoid or alleviate foreseeable problems associated with the stage of negotiation. 62. For a general account of institutional bargaining, see Young, International Governance.

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A final area of interest in this discussion is the matter of institutional design. Few players engaged in agenda formation enter this process with welldeveloped institutional blueprints in mind. Even Stoltenberg, coming out of the battle over the generative ideas underlying the BEAR within the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, does not seem to have had anything like a negotiating text to offer either at the Tromso meeting in April 1992 or at those meetings that immediately followed. It may turn out to be counterproductive for leading advocates of proposed regimes to move too quickly in introducing detailed proposals. A primary function of the stage of agenda formation is to draw in prospective participants and to give them a sense of ownership of the basic ideas associated with the issues to be addressed. Tabling detailed proposals at this stage would be inappropriate. At the same time, the framing of issues during the stage of agenda formation can have major consequences for the design of the institutional arrangements that ultimately emerge from the regime formation process. In the case of the AEPS, for instance, it has proven difficult to break out of the interstate mold cast during the stage of agenda formation, even though many participants have become increasingly receptive to the involvement of nonstate actors since the adoption of the ministerial declaration in Rovaniemi in June 1991. By contrast, the explicit recognition during the course of agenda formation of a dual structure for the BEAR—featuring a Barents Council defined in interstate terms and a Regional Council made up of subnational units of government—produced expectations that could not have been altered at a later stage under any circumstances. It follows that the process of agenda formation may have profound consequences for the design of institutions, even though this process is not primarily about institutional design. Thoughtful participants engaged in regime formation will recognize these links and act accordingly.

C H A P T E R FOUR

Negotiation: The Roads to Rovaniemi and Kirkenes

T

he process of agenda formation left a heavy imprint on the activities of the negotiators who labored to devise the terms of the 1991 Rovaniemi Declaration (along with the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy that accompanies it) and the 1993 Kirkenes Declaration. There could be little doubt in the minds of participants in the 20-26 September 1989 meeting in Rovaniemi, for instance, that any agreement arising from the Finnish Initiative would involve intergovernmental arrangements highlighting the role of the Arctic Eight, focusing on environmental protection, and reflecting the approach to transboundary pollution made familiar through the experience of the Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution Regime in Europe. Similar observations are in order regarding the negotiations leading to the Kirkenes Declaration. By the time of the 25 April 1992 meeting of first governors, it was clear to all that any arrangements arising out of the Norwegian Initiative would be broad in terms of functional scope, place a high priority on efforts to integrate Russia into a regime for the Euro-Arctic Region, and feature a dual system involving subnational as well as national governments. These are major constraints that effectively defined the range of options considered in the two cases. It appears that the negotiation process leading to agreements like the Rovaniemi Declaration and the Kirkenes Declaration constitutes a form of bounded bargaining. Yet it would be a serious error to conclude from this that the process of agenda formation determined the course of the negotiations occurring in these cases. There was nothing inevitable about the successful conclusion of these negotiations; either the Finnish Initiative or the Norwegian Initiative could have failed to reach closure on an agreement to cooperate on an ongoing basis. Major issues—such as whether to opt for hard law or soft law agreements, how to strike a balance between programmatic and regulative arrangements, and what provisions to make to accommodate the concerns of the Arctic's indigenous peoples—were very much in play during these negotiations. What is more, the negotiation process in both cases was openended in the sense that it allowed for the introduction of new concepts within the overall framework fixed during the stage of agenda formation. 86

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The negotiations leading to the Kirkenes Declaration offer particularly clear illustrations of this phenomenon, for the participants found themselves faced with the task of inventing the Barents Euro-Arctic Region.1 In this chapter, I explore in depth the negotiation stage of regime formation in the cases of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR). Following the introduction, brief negotiation narratives lay out the timelines, identify the casts of characters, and comment on the negotiating formats employed in the two cases. The next section characterizes the negotiation process as a form of institutional bargaining and differentiates bargaining of this type from the conceptions of bargaining embedded in mainstream accounts of negotiation. This is followed by three sections dealing with factors thought to influence the course of institutional bargaining. The first explores the extent to which the nature of the problems addressed in the two cases shaped the negotiation process. The second turns directly to process considerations and seeks to capture the character of the strategic interactions leading to the Rovaniemi and Kirkenes Declarations. The third assesses the relative significance of major social drivers—power, ideas, and interests—in producing the outcomes reflected in the provisions of the two declarations. The final section of the chapter then returns to a consideration of Chapter 1's hypotheses about the political dynamics of regime formation in light of the preceding account of the negotiation stage occurring in the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR. The most striking insights to emerge from this exploration can be summarized as follows. The negotiation stage is, first and foremost, an interestdriven affair. It is also a complex, mixed-motive activity that centers on efforts to build large coalitions in support of projects designed to solve problems in the absence of definitive information about the locus of the contract curve or the Pareto frontier. Like the treatment of nature and nurture as forces affecting the development of individuals, problem type and process can be viewed as elements that interact with each other to determine the trajectory and ultimately the outcomes of institutional bargaining. Debates about which of these forces is the more fundamental are doomed to failure and run the risk of obstructing the search for insights regarding interactions between the two. With regard to process, the efforts of pushers and laggards, the impacts of domestic politics, and the actions of individual leaders are all forces to be reckoned with in most cases. In the final analysis, success in the negotiation stage requires an ability to maintain political momentum in the face of misunderstandings or disagreements about 1. Tunander, "Inventing the Barents Region."

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the terms of constitutive contracts as well as the diversionary pressures associated with the efforts of those seeking to push different issues to the top of the international political agenda. Negotiation Narratives The negotiations beginning in Rovaniemi on 20 September 1989 followed a classic pattern featuring a series of preparatory sessions aimed at drafting and subsequently refining unified texts that became the basis for the Ministerial Declaration and the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy adopted at the conclusion of the negotiation stage (see Table 4.1). At the Rovaniemi session, each of the eight Arctic states fielded a delegation, ranging in size from eleven in the host Finnish delegation to two in the American delegation and one in the Icelandic delegation. The only other participant was a single representative of the UN Economic Commission for Europe. The meeting, which was opened by Kaj Barlund, the Finnish Minister of the Environment, elected Esko Rajakoski as chair along with J. Alan Beesley of Canada and Desiree Edmar of Sweden as vice chairs. In addition, the meeting quickly established two working groups: one on "the state of the environment in the Arctic and the need for further action," chaired by Edmar; and a second on "existing international legal instruments for the protection of the Arctic environment and the organization of future co-operation," chaired by Beesley.2 Perhaps the major accomplishment of the September 1989 session was the development of a consensus on the proposition that the consultations should continue—a consensus carrying at least an implicit presumption in favor of the idea that it would be helpful to arrive at some sort of international agreement dealing with environmental protection in the Arctic. Given that several countries, most notably the United States and Norway, had been extremely lukewarm about sending delegations to Rovaniemi and that others, like Sweden, had real concerns about the pressure emanating from Finland to participate, this is no small accomplishment. During this session, individual countries also undertook to prepare state of the environment reports on acidification, chlorinated organics, oil, radioactivity, heavy metals, and noise. What is more, the Rovaniemi session set the pattern for the organization of the preparatory meetings that followed and led to a process in which the heads of delegations (HODs) emerged as an effective group that could and did play an important role throughout the process when it came to dealing with political concerns lurking 2. See "Report of the Consultative Meeting on the Protection of the Arctic Environment, September 20-26, 1989" (on file with author).

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Table 4.1 Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) negotiation timeline 12 January 1989 30 August 1989 20-26 September 1989 26 October 1989 24 November 1989 4-5 December 1989 18-23 April 1990 28 August 1990 16-20 September 1990 12-16 November 1990 15-17 January 1991 6-8 May 1991

10-12 June 1991 13-14 June 1991 14 June 1991

Finnish letter of invitation Paris press conference Rovaniemi preparatory meeting Finnish/Soviet agreement on borderlands air pollutants Mulroney speech in Leningrad New York meeting of legal experts Yellowknife preparatory meeting IASC Founding Articles signed Anchorage founding meeting of Northern Forum Oslo meeting of experts Kiruna preparatory meeting Helsinki preparatory meeting Rovaniemi preparatory meeting Rovaniemi ministerial meeting Rovaniemi Declaration signed

just below the surface of these discussions, which were ostensibly confined to matters of environmental protection. There followed a series of additional preparatory sessions held in a variety of locations and culminating in the June 1991 ministerial meeting in Rovaniemi at which the agreement was signed. The Finnish mission to the United Nations in New York organized an informal working session in December 1989 on legal issues relating to environmental protection in the Arctic. At the second formal preparatory session, held in Yellowknife, Canada, during April 1990, Alan Beesley served as chair, and the two working groups (chaired by Edmar and Tom Gronberg of Finland) continued to deal with their assigned tasks. Among the notable features of the Yellowknife session, which produced a remarkably extensive documentary record, were the presence of representatives of the Federal Republic of Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Inuit Circumpolar Conference as observers; the emerging emphasis on monitoring and assessment with respect to the major pollutants identified at Rovaniemi; and the production of an initial draft of what evolved over time into the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS). It is probably fair to say that all the delegations left Yellowknife with the expectation that an international agreement on environmental protection in the Arctic would be signed in 1991. The Norwegian Environment Ministry hosted a meeting of scientific experts in November 1990 to consider needs for monitoring and assessment

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relating to the pollutants covered by the AEPS. This technical meeting paved the way for the next full-scale preparatory session, which occurred in Kiruna, Sweden, during January 1991 and focused attention on preparing a more finished draft of the AEPS, despite the fact that the Gulf War began while the delegates were gathered in northern Sweden. A small preparatory session (intended primarily for HODs) held in Helsinki in early May confirmed the intention of the parties to embody their agreement in a ministerial declaration rather than a convention or treaty and turned to the task of drafting what emerged as the Declaration on the Protection of the Arctic Environment in contrast to the longer strategy document, which the declaration adopts and calls on the parties to implement. Returning to Rovaniemi in June 1991, the parties held a final, three-day preparatory session followed by a ministerial meeting on June 13 and 14. To the annoyance of some delegates, this preparatory session was called on to deal with a sizable number of wording problems, many of them arising from a last-minute process of policy clearance taking place in the United States. At the ministerial meeting itself, all parties with the exception of the United States were represented by ministers, and the observer corps expanded to include the Federal Republic of Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, the International Arctic Science Committee, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, the Nordic Saami Council, the USSR Association of Small Peoples of the North, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, and the United Nations Environment Programme. The ministerial meeting was designated as the First Ministerial Conference on the Protection of the Arctic Environment, and the parties agreed to gather for a second conference in Greenland during 1993. The declaration itself, signed on 14 June 1991, is a brief document, but it commits the parties to pursuing the AEPS as a joint action plan and to implementing agreed measures dealing with monitoring and assessment, the protection of the Arctic marine environment, emergency prevention, preparedness and response, and the conservation of Arctic flora and fauna. The negotiations leading to the Kirkenes Declaration in January 1993 followed a somewhat different and less typical pattern (see Table 4.2). While he made some effort to keep the Finns and Swedes informed of his moves early on, Stoltenberg clearly focused on the importance of drawing the Russians into this initiative and on the centrality of what emerged as the dual system linking national and subnational forms of cooperation. Thus, the consultation with Kozyrev in early March 1992 (immediately following the Copenhagen meeting of foreign ministers of the Baltic Sea states), in which Stoltenberg was able to persuade the Russians of the attractiveness of the Barents initiative, was clearly a critical step in the deci-

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Table 4.2 Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR) negotiation timeline 5-6 March 1992 7-8 March 1992 9 April 1992 25 April 1992 9-10 July 1992 26-27 August 1992 4 September 1992 25-27 September 1992 13-14 October 1992 20-21 October 1992 22 October 1992 1 December 1992 9 December 1992 14-15 December 1992 11 January 1993

Copenhagen meeting of foreign ministers of the Baltic Sea states Stoltenberg/Kozyrev Oslo meeting Baltic Sea Convention signed Tromso meeting of regional governors and protocol of cooperation Helsinki CSCE summit Svalbard meeting of Nordic foreign ministers Kirkenes Joint Declaration of Environment Ministers Kirkenes meeting of experts Tromso meeting of experts on the Northern Sea Route Rovaniemi seminar "From North Calotte to Great Calotte" First draft Kirkenes Declaration Second draft Kirkenes Declaration Oslo preparatory meeting Stockholm CSCE council meeting Ministerial meeting in Kirkenes and signing of Kirkenes Declaration

sion to go public with the initiative in April. It is notable, as well, that the first governors' meeting in late April, which opened the stage of public negotiations in this case, was attended only by representatives of subnational governments in Norway and Russia (specifically, Nordland, Troms, Finnmark, Murmansk, and Archangel). Just as the alliance with Kozyrev looms large in the evolution of this initiative at the international level, the links between Stoltenberg and Erling Flotten, governor of Finnmark and like Stoltenberg a member of the Labor Party, emerged during this process as a key to the ideas underlying the dual system that is one of the striking features of the Norwegian Initiative. There followed a series of steps in which Stoltenberg and his allies sought to highlight the concept of the Barents Region and to line up a variety of forces in support of the initiative. At the CSCE meeting in Helsinki during July 1992, the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, was persuaded to endorse the project. The Nordic foreign ministers, meeting in Svalbard during late August, discussed the idea of the Barents Region with approval. On 4 September, the environment ministers of Russia and the Nordic countries issued a joint declaration calling for cooperation to solve common environmental problems. A sizable group of experts, drawn from all the members of the Barents Region but weighted heavily to Norwegians

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and Russians, met in Kirkenes during late September to build a conceptual and analytic base for the idea of the Barents Region, a process that was carried forward through a series of background studies commissioned by the Norwegian Foreign Ministry and conducted by the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo.3 In effect, all these steps served to line up the key players associated with the Barents initiative and to provide momentum for the more explicit preparatory negotiations taking place in the fall of 1992. These explicit negotiations began in earnest at a seminar entitled "From North Calotte to Great Calotte," which took place in Rovaniemi from 20 to 22 October and produced the first serious draft of the Kirkenes Declaration. Both the location and the theme of this session were clearly aimed to attract the support of the Finns, who were still operating through the North Calotte Committee under the auspices of the Nordic Council of Ministers and who were moving toward increased collaboration with the Russians under an initiative known as Adjacent Areas Cooperation and loosely coordinated by the Committee.4 There could be no doubt by the end of this session that an agreement would be reached to launch the Barents Euro-Arctic Region and that a ministerial meeting would take place in the near future to finalize and sign a ministerial declaration to this effect. The rest of the negotiation stage proceeded swiftly. A second draft of the declaration appeared on 1 December, and another preparatory session occurring on 9 December set the stage for the Kirkenes meeting on 11 January 1993. By contrast with the June 1991 AEPS ministerial meeting and reflecting the broad functional scope of the Norwegian Initiative, the January meeting in Kirkenes was organized as a conference of foreign ministers. This meeting produced the Declaration on Cooperation in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region, a somewhat more substantial document than the June 1991 Rovaniemi Declaration but not accompanied by anything analogous to the AEPS. The parties represented in Kirkenes included Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Poland, Russia, Sweden, the United States, and the Commission of the European Community—a list reflecting Stoltenberg's desire to present the Barents cooperation as an initiative of interest to many members of international society. Among the actual signatories to the Kirkenes Declaration are the five Nordic states, Russia, and the EC Commission. The Saami, who had requested representation on the Barents Euro-Arctic Council, were accorded 3. Shortened versions of most of the resultant papers appear in the journal of the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, International Challenges 12:4 (1992). 4. In 1992, for example, Finland and Russia negotiated a bilateral agreement covering cooperation in Lapland and Murmansk treated as adjacent areas.

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a permanent place on the Regional Council, as were the subnational governments of the region.5 Karelia, which was not included in the original list of members of the Regional Council, was added during April 1993 as a means of enhancing Finnish interests in the success of this initiative. The differences between these two negotiation stories are significant. Whereas the negotiations leading to Rovaniemi in June 1991 focused on environmental issues and were carried out in the absence of high-level involvement on the part of foreign ministries, the negotiations leading to Kirkenes in January 1993 were more overtly political and cast at the level of foreign ministers due to the active engagement of Stoltenberg. While the negotiations leading to the Rovaniemi Declaration settled quickly into a well-defined pattern of preparatory meetings featuring the efforts of working groups, the negotiations leading to the Kirkenes Declaration started out with a phase of constituency building before settling into a more conventional process of preparatory sessions in the fall of 1992. It follows that some of the procedural devices employed in the earlier case, such as the role of the HODs and the assignment of various tasks to individual countries, did not loom large in the negotiations leading to Kirkenes in January 1993. Fundamentally, however, the negotiation stages of these cases of regime formation followed similar patterns. In both cases, a specific player launched the negotiations by proposing a project that would lead to sustained, multilateral cooperation. In both cases, again, this action initiated a process involving a series of preparatory activities, an effort to hammer out the terms of a constitutive contract acceptable to all the major players, and the building of sufficient momentum to ensure success in a culminating ministerial meeting. The Norwegian Initiative was more overtly political than the Finnish Initiative, and Stoltenberg's strategy of selling the project first to the Russians and then endeavoring to bring in the Finns and the Swedes certainly differed from the effort of the Finns to draw in all Arctic states at the outset. But it is just as clear that the road to Rovaniemi encompassed a political element well understood by the parties as it is that the road to Kirkenes included a variety of functional elements that provided an effective vehicle for the pursuit of larger political concerns connected to the new political architecture of Europe arising in connection with the end of the Cold War and the expansion of the European Union.

5. O. E. Magga, President of the Norwegian Saami Council, speech given at the conference on "Cooperation in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region," Kirkenes, 11 January 1993.

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Institutional Bargaining At least since the publication in 1960 of Thomas Schelling's seminal work entitled The Strategy of Conflict, students of international negotiations have shown a marked tendency to focus on situations involving a welldefined contract curve or negotiation set and to explore the uses of bargaining tactics intended to maximize payoffs for their users within the range of outcomes preferred by the parties to an outcome of no agreement. As Schelling himself writes in introducing his analysis, "we shall be concerned with what might be called the 'distributional' aspect of bargaining: the situations in which a better bargain for one means less for the other." These are, in other words, "situations that ultimately involve an element of pure bargaining. A bargain is struck when somebody makes a final sufficient concession."6 Not surprisingly, this focus has led many to immerse themselves in the analysis of threats, promises, and various types of committal tactics. As others have observed, however, the "distributional" aspect of bargaining is by no means the whole story when it comes to the study of negotiations. In another seminal work, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations, published in 1965, Richard Walton and Robert McKersie introduced the idea of integrative bargaining and explored the role of negotiation in expanding the pie to be divided, thus obviating the need to settle on the division of a fixed pie.7 They explored the ways in which bargaining can shift the Pareto frontier to the northeast as well as the roll of negotiation in identifying a point on the Pareto frontier at which a bargain will be struck. Under real-world conditions, bargaining typically involves both distributive and integrative elements. It is, in Schelling's terminology, a mixedmotive or competitive-cooperative process. The usual response to this observation is simply to combine the principal features of distributive bargaining as outlined by Schelling and those of integrative bargaining as described by Walton and McKersie. This procedure has the virtue of preserving the standard graphical representations of the bargaining process, particularly if we assume that integrative bargaining occurs first and serves to fix the locus of the contract curve or the Pareto frontier and that distributive bargaining then kicks in as a means of settling on a specific point on the curve/frontier at which the bargain is struck. For better or worse, 6. Schelling, Strategy of Conflict, 21. 7. Richard E. Walton and Robert B. McKersie, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations: An Analysis of a Social Interaction System, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965, especially chaps. 4 and 5.

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this is the intellectual capital that most students of negotiation bring to the study of regime formation in international society.8 Unfortunately, it requires a heroic effort to force actual cases of bargaining over constitutive contracts setting forth the provisions of international regimes expected to remain in place indefinitely into this conceptual framework. How would we identify a fully specified menu of options, much less a contract curve, facing those who worked on the provisions of the declarations adopted in Rovaniemi in June 1991 and in Kirkenes in January 1993? To what extent can we conceptualize these processes as sequences of offers and counteroffers gradually converging toward agreement "when somebody makes a final, sufficient concession"?9 This is not to suggest that the participants in the negotiation stage of these cases of regime formation did not endeavor to pursue their own interests in this process. But the conceptual framework underpinning mainstream analyses of bargaining is extremely hard to apply to cases like those under consideration here. This is partly a consequence of the fact that regime formation in these cases involved a number of parties, whereas the conceptual framework works best in thinking about two-party interactions, which economists call bilateral monopoly.10 Partly, it is a matter of the information required to specify contract curves or Pareto frontiers in anything more than stylized terms. But in large part, the problem arises from the fact that those engaged in institutional bargaining simply do not conceive of their enterprise in a manner that maps onto the conceptual apparatus associated with the most well-known and influential efforts to model the bargaining process. The negotiations under consideration here, which I have described as the roads to Rovaniemi and Kirkenes, suggest an alternative perspective on institutional bargaining, or, in other words, bargaining over the provisions of institutional arrangements expected to guide the interactions of the participants in a given issue area over an indefinite period of time.11 The cornerstone of this alternative is the proposition that institutional bargaining is fundamentally a process of coalition building aimed at lining up support for regime building projects. The process of coalition building in this connection differs profoundly from the notions of coalition building 8. See also John S. Odell, "Toward a Valid Theory of International Economic Negotiation," unpublished paper dated 20 April 1995. 9. Schelling, Strategy of Conflict, 21. For a systematic effort to model concession mechanisms in the context of bargaining processes, see Cross, Economics of Bargaining. 10. This is especially true of economic models of bargaining, which are surveyed and critiqued in Young, ed., Bargaining, part 2. 11. For an extended account of institutional bargaining, see Young, International Governance, chap. 4.

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familiar to students of N-person game theory or legislative politics.12 The goal is not to forge winning coalitions under conditions in which victory goes to groups that succeed in putting together coalitions that meet the requirements for victory, and the familiar logic associated with the idea of minimum winning coalitions has no application to this setting.13 Rather, institutional bargaining centers on the effort to build coalitions—the larger the better—around agreements that set forth the constitutive provisions of regimes or governance systems expected to guide the interactions of the participants in a given issue area over an indefinite period of time. Approached in this way, institutional bargaining generally exhibits a well-defined pattern. The process begins when some champion (there may be two or more in some cases) takes the initiative and proposes a move to the stage of negotiation with regard to a definite project. The Finnish Initiative and the Norwegian Initiative in the cases under consideration here constitute classic examples of this phenomenon. The process then proceeds through a series of preparatory activities and eventually formal preparatory meetings. At a relatively early stage, these meetings give rise to negotiating texts that become the vehicles that drive the process toward the conclusion of a constitutive contract. Negotiating texts can and often do involve package deals that sweeten the basic proposition for as many participants as possible. The AEPS is a clear case in point, with its emphasis on monitoring and assessment for Norway, the conservation of flora and fauna for Canada, and emergency preparedness and response for the United States. Beyond this, negotiating texts frequently carry forward bracketed provisions to mark areas of disagreement, and the final products often contain ambiguous language that reflects a sense that it is more important to get parties on board at this stage than it is to pin down institutional provisions with precision.14 Many cases of institutional bargaining give rise to a division of labor in which different parties agree to assume the role of lead country with respect to distinct elements of the institutional package. Again, the AEPS provides a classic example, with individual countries preparing the various status reports on the state of the Arctic environment as well as the 12. For an effort to apply standard game-theoretic ideas to international multilateral negotiations, see Steven J. Brams, Ann E. Doherty, and Matthew L. Weidner, "Game Theory: Focusing on the Players, Decisions, and Agreements," in Zartman, ed., International Multilateral Negotiation, 95-112. 13. Riker, Theory of Political Coalitions. 14. For extended accounts of these issues in the case of climate change, see Daniel Bodansky, "The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: A Commentary," Yale Journal of International Law 18 (1993): 451-558; and Mintzer and Leonard, eds., Negotiating Climate Change.

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programmatic elements that coalesced into the action plans. Throughout everything, the critical issue is to maintain the momentum needed to carry the process of institutional bargaining to a successful conclusion. That is why leaders in the process of institutional bargaining regularly push at an early stage for an agreement in principle that a convention, treaty, or ministerial declaration will be adopted so that the preparatory meetings acquire a clear sense of being goal-directed. This account of institutional bargaining as a matter of building coalitions around problem-driven projects should not be read as suggesting that the process is always harmonious. For the most part, participants in the negotiation stage of regime formation have relatively well-developed conceptions of their own interests, and there is no reason to expect that these interests will always be identical or even fully compatible.15 The result is a pattern of pulling and hauling concentrated on efforts to influence the contents of the negotiating texts. This may lead to a watering down of texts to satisfy divergent interests or to a form of "tote-board diplomacy" in which some of the participants agree on provisions (for example, the 1985 sulfur protocol to the Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution Regime in Europe) that others are unwilling to accept.16 This process ordinarily yields outcomes that represent the highest common denominator among the participants, in contrast to the lowest common denominator described by some commentators.17 This may also help to explain the emphasis in many cases of institutional bargaining on getting the overall vision or the general discourse right, for it is easier to deal with divergent interests at this level than at the level of detailed provisions on matters of particular concern to individual participants. Nor is there any reason to expect that gains from institutional bargaining will be symmetrical or evenly distributed among the parties concerned. Of course, all participants must expect to reap gains (or avoid losses) as a reward for engaging in institutional bargaining. Otherwise, it would not make sense to describe the process as a form of bargaining at all. Still, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Norway emerged as the big winner in the case of the BEAR and that those pushing the idea of the Arctic as a policy-relevant region fared particularly well in the case of the AEPS. The concerns of the Arctic's indigenous peoples fared better in 15. For accounts that raise questions about this proposition from a social constructivist point of view, see Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics," International Organization 46 (1992): 391-425; Litfin, Ozone Discourses. 16. Levy, "European Acid Rain," 75-132. 17. See, for example, Peter H. Sand, Lessons Learned in Global Environmental Governance, Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future, 1990.

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connection with the AEPS than with the BEAR. But conversely, subnational units of government made more gains in connection with the BEAR than the AEPS. Two things act to mitigate the impact of these asymmetries with regard to most episodes of institutional bargaining. The use of package deals often makes it possible to satisfy the primary concerns of different participants in a way that avoids invidious comparisons regarding the distribution of gains.18 Even more fundamentally, the fact that most cases of institutional bargaining are covered by a relatively thick "veil of uncertainty" makes it difficult for the parties to make meaningful predictions about the long-term or ultimate distribution of rewards during the negotiation stage of regime formation.19 Here, again, the AEPS and the BEAR are exemplary cases. Who can say, even today, what the distributional consequences of the operation of these regimes will be over time? As I have suggested throughout this section, the model of institutional bargaining proposed here fits the negotiation stage of the creation of the AEPS and the BEAR well. It is difficult to think of either of these cases in terms of the specification of a contract curve or welfare frontier followed by a sequence of offers and counteroffers ultimately converging on a mutually agreeable point on the curve/frontier. Nor does it make sense to think of these cases in terms of efforts to build winning coalitions of the sort familiar to students of N-person game theory or legislative politics. What we have, instead, are political projects (even in the seemingly technical AEPS negotiations everyone recognized the political agendas lurking not far beneath the surface) designed to respond to emerging problems, championed by key states, and framed in such a way as to appeal to a variety of participants. This does not mean that everyone participated in the resultant negotiations with equal enthusiasm. The Norwegians and, especially, the Americans were reluctant participants in the negotiations leading to the Rovaniemi Declaration (and the AEPS) in June 1991. Similarly, the Norwegians had to work hard to draw the Swedes, who were more interested in the Baltic Sea Region, and the Finns, who were thinking about cooperation in northern Fennoscandia in other terms, into the negotiations leading to the Kirkenes Declaration in January 1993. Still, the pattern in both cases is clear. Participants in a series of preparatory meetings sought to reach agreement on the terms of a negotiating text emphasizing the basic vision of the institutional arrangement to be created more than the details 18. This is one reason why some of the claims advanced by those who emphasize relative gains are difficult to apply to real-world situations. See also Sebenius, "Negotiation Arithmetic." 19. Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan, The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, chap. 2.

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of its specific regulative or programmatic provisions. The result, again in each case, was an agreement to launch a cooperative enterprise expected to take on a life of its own and, in the process, to evolve in ways that could not be foreseen by the principal authors of the constitutive contract. Problem Types The success or failure of efforts to negotiate constitutive contracts, according to many who have thought about the matter, is substantially determined by the nature of the problem a regime is expected to solve. Partly, this is a simple matter of the complexity of the issues at stake and, consequently, the number of parties and the range of concerns that need to be considered. Difficult as it is to regulate trade in endangered species, for example, the challenge of controlling the forces leading to habitat destruction is even greater. Similarly, the problem of regulating emissions of greenhouse gases is of a different order than the problem of phasing out the use of chlorofluorocarbons.20 Even more to the point is the proposition that success in efforts to negotiate agreements setting forth the provisions of regimes is commonly a function of the degree to which the interests of the principal participants conflict and, therefore, of the locus of the problem on a spectrum whose antipodes are pure conflict and pure cooperation. It is relatively easy, for example, to solve coordination problems in which everyone benefits from the articulation of common rules and no one has an incentive to defect once the rules are in place.21 International regimes focusing on the "rules of the road," like the arrangements governing ships at sea and civil aviation, exemplify this class of social practices. Where conflicts of interest are severe relative to incentives to cooperate, by contrast, it is much more difficult to reach agreement on the provisions of international regimes. The familiar upstream/ downstream problem in connection with river basins and the problem of controlling asymmetrical fluxes of transboundary air pollution illustrate this situation.22 Given the fact that regimes typically come into existence in response to problems, this line of reasoning is intuitively appealing; it clearly has much to recommend it in general terms. But what can this perspective tell 20. James K. Sebenius, "Designing Negotiations Toward a New Regime: The Case of Global Warming" International Security 15 (1991): 110-48. 21. Duncan Snidal, "Coordination Versus Prisoner's Dilemma: Implications for International Cooperation and Regimes," American Political Science Review 79 (1985): 923-42. 22. Thomas Bernauer, "Managing International Rivers," paper presented at annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 31 August-3 September 1995.

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us about the negotiation stage of regime formation in specific cases like those under consideration here? Can we characterize the problems giving rise to these cases in terms of well-defined analytic categories, and does the process of associating the cases with broader categories help to account for the outcomes of these negotiations? In this section, I argue that this exercise is more complex than it seems at first and that there are significant limits to the value of this procedure in the analysis of cases like the AEPS and the BEAR. To see this, it will help to differentiate several strands of the argument and to apply them one-by-one to the cases. In the following paragraphs, then, I examine the idea of problem structure developed by the Tubingen group, various ideas regarding configurations of interests arising from game-theoretic models, and the idea of problem sets articulated in my own prior work. As articulated by Volker Rittberger and Michael Ziirn, the problemstructural approach arises from a conception of regimes as mechanisms for dealing with conflict and "contends that the properties of issues (or conflicts) (pre)determine the ways in which they are dealt with." On this account, it is useful to distinguish among "conflicts about values, conflicts about means, conflicts of interest about relatively assessed goods, and conflicts of interest about absolutely assessed goods."23 This taxonomy of conflicts provides the basis for the hypotheses that conflicts about values are the most difficult to regulate, whereas conflicts of interest about relatively assessed goods are the second most difficult. Conflicts about means are believed to be relatively easy to solve through regime formation, and conflicts of interest about absolutely assessed goods are most conducive to institutionalized regulation. At least two distinct variables are embedded in this line of reasoning: the difference between means and ends (or values), and the difference between what have become known as relative gains and absolute gains.24 In general, the negotiation stage of regime formation should go more smoothly in cases involving instrumental issues and absolute gains rather than values and relative gains. How does this line of reasoning about the role of problem structure apply to the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR? The answer to this question is by no means clear. Although it is possible to discern elements of conflict in the two cases (for example, over the locus of responsibility for transboundary impacts of airborne or waterborne pollutants), it is notable 23. Volker Rittberger and Michael Ziirn, "Regime Theory: Findings from the Study of 'East-West' Regimes," Cooperation and Conflict 26 (1991): 171 (emphasis in original). 24. A number of contributions to the debate about relative gains are collected in David A. Baldwin, ed., Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

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that the key negotiators presented the AEPS and the BEAR as projects intended to promote the common good and that they devoted particular attention both to articulating visions of the Arctic and the Barents Region as policy relevant areas and to devising a general discourse suitable for addressing issues in these regions rather than a set of detailed provisions that would be likely to actualize potential conflicts among the parties involved. At the same time, the parties engaged in creating the AEPS and the BEAR did bring relatively well-defined interests to the negotiations in the two cases. While the creation of these regimes undoubtedly contributed to the development of new roles for member states (for example, Norway's role as lead state for the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme), it did not do so in the absence of preexisting constellations of interests. This suggests that the key distinction in these cases from a problem structural point of view is the one between absolute and relative gains. We may infer from the outcomes of these cases that the parties behaved in some general sense as maximizers of absolute rather than relative gains. But it is far from clear how to operationalize this distinction and use it in a manner that avoids circular reasoning in order to explain the results of negotiations in cases like these. Overall, my sense is that the problem-structure approach as developed thus far is of limited value in helping us to understand the details of the negotiation stage in specific cases like the AEPS and the BEAR. A second approach, inspired largely by utilitarian reasoning and more specifically by game-theoretic perspectives on interactive decisionmaking looks to configurations of interests in the search for insights about links between the nature of the problem and prospects for success in efforts to form regimes. Some results of this approach are well-known and clearly helpful. Thus, coordination problems, which have one or more stable equilibria, are easier to solve than cooperation problems, which do not have equilibria, because there is no danger of cheating in cases with stable equilibria and therefore no need for sophisticated compliance mechanisms.25 Problems with suboptimal equilibria (for example, the prisoner's dilemma) are difficult to solve because there is a powerful, built-in tendency for participants to defect from cooperative arrangements. More generally, the locus of a problem on the spectrum running from pure cooperation to pure conflict is likely to influence prospects for success in efforts to form regimes. The polar extremes are relatively uninteresting; there is no prospect of success in cases of pure conflict, and the problem 25. See Snidal, "Coordination Versus Prisoner's Dilemma"; and Lisa Martin, "Interests, Power, and Multilateralism," International Organization 46 (1992): 765-92.

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of devising cooperative solutions to problems of pure cooperation is trivial in analytic terms (although benefits to the parties may be substantial). But within these bounds, it makes sense intuitively to anticipate that the difficulty of forming regimes will increase as a function of movement along the spectrum in the direction of pure conflict. In the hands of Arild Underdal and his colleagues in Norway, this approach has been adapted and expanded to differentiate between problems that are benign or malign from the point of view of regime formation.26 As Underdal puts it, this distinction is "a function of the configuration of actor preferences and beliefs" measured in terms of asymmetries among actor interests and incongruities between the cost/benefit calculations of individual actors and those of the group.27 In effect, problems are malign when some participants have few incentives to solve them and when the collective-action problems they pose are particularly nasty or severe.28 What does this approach have to tell us about the negotiation stage of regime formation in cases like the AEPS and the BEAR? In broad terms, I have portrayed these processes as cases of interactive decisionmaking among self-interested actors. So it should be possible, at least in principle, to make use of these utilitarian concepts in analyzing them. Yet it is far from clear how to exploit this line of reasoning to good effect in these cases. Neither the AEPS nor the BEAR presents the appearance of a coordination problem. But given the fact that both of these arrangements are weighted heavily toward programmatic activities in contrast to regulative prescriptions, an analysis that focuses on problems of cheating and on the development of effective compliance mechanisms does not carry us far in understanding these cases. Regime formation, in both instances, was more nearly a process of energizing the participants to agree on action plans on the understanding that the level of effort associated with the implementation of these plans would inevitably vary both from country to country and over time within the same country. Beyond this, it is certainly possible to identify asymmetries among the participants in the negotiation process with regard to their interests in the AEPS and the BEAR. 26. Steinar Andresen and J0rgen Wettestad, "International Problem-Solving Effectiveness: The Oslo Project So Far," International Environmental Affairs 7 (Spring 1995): 127-49. 27. Arild Underdal, "Measuring and Explaining Regime Effectiveness," in Helge Hveem, ed., Complex Cooperation: Institutions and Processes in International Resource Management, Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1994, 108. 28. The latest version of the Norwegian approach distinguishes between "intellectual" and "political" factors and proposes the terms "easy" and "difficult" as broader categories than "benign" and "malign." See, for example, J0rgen Wettestad, "'Nuts and Bolts for Environmental Negotiators': Designing Effective International Regimes," Oslo, Fridtjof Nansen Institute Working Paper, January 1995, especially 47-50.

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The United States, for example, was an extremely reluctant participant in the negotiations beginning in Rovaniemi in September 1989, and Finland and Sweden certainly had less at stake than Norway in the effort to reach agreement on the terms of the Kirkenes Declaration. But what does this mean in terms of placing these cases on the benign/malign spectrum? There is no easy answer to this question. Yet another approach focuses on problem sets and looks to the substantive features of problems in the effort to think about the prospects for success in the negotiation stage of regime formation. With respect to environmental issues, for instance, this approach features distinctions among commons problems, shared natural resource problems, and transboundary externality problems.29 There is no basis for concluding that problems belonging to one or another of these categories are invariably harder to solve than those belonging to the others. But within each problem set, it is possible to point to relevant differences. When a common pool resource is affected by the actions of large numbers of actors (for example, emitters of greenhouse gases), regime formation is apt to pose greater problems than in cases involving a much smaller number of actors (for instance, users of orbital slots). Problems of shared natural resources involving upstream users and downstream users are likely to be more difficult to solve than those in which the circumstances of the parties are more nearly parallel (for instance, boundary lakes or straddling stocks of fish). Similarly, problems of transboundary externalities that are highly asymmetrical in character (for example, transboundary fluxes of airborne pollutants that run in one direction only) are likely to pose difficulties that are less pronounced in more symmetrical cases. Presumably, similar observations regarding problem sets could be elaborated with regard to other issue areas. The hallmark of this approach is a concern with the substantive nature of problems coupled with an analytic perspective that is basically utilitarian in nature. Where does this line of thought take us with regard to the process of negotiating the AEPS and the BEAR? The first thing to note is that it is difficult to classify these cases in terms of simple distinctions among problem sets. Even in the case of the AEPS, which is oriented largely toward environmental protection, we can see elements of all three types of problems operative at the same time. When we turn to the BEAR, the situation is even more complex because the arrangement encompasses a broad range of issues, including environmental matters but extending to economic, cultural, scientific, and even geopolitical concerns. What is more, 29. Young, International Governance, chap. 1.

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individual participants clearly brought different perspectives regarding the nature of the problem with them to the negotiations beginning in Rovaniemi in September 1989 and in Tromso in April 1992. Whereas the Finns were particularly concerned about transboundary fluxes of airborne pollutants between the Kola Peninsula and northern Finland, for example, the Canadians were more concerned with protecting habitats of critical importance to animal populations. By the same token, a desire to energize efforts to reconstruct the economy of northwestern Russia spurred Russian participation in the BEAR, while environmental threats and geopolitical concerns loomed larger in the thinking of the Norwegians. This does not mean that analytic distinctions like the upstream/downstream dichotomy and the idea of symmetry and asymmetry regarding transboundary fluxes of pollutants are trivial or irrelevant. But it does suggest that realworld situations are often multidimensional and difficult to characterize in terms of simple distinctions of this kind. While general propositions linking the nature of the problem to the prospects for success in establishing international regimes are illuminating in heuristic terms, they are of limited use in helping us to understand the negotiation stage of the process of regime formation in specific cases. For the most part, parties to such negotiations exhibit a marked tendency to focus on projects that give rise to negotiating texts rather than dwelling on the nature of the problem underlying their efforts. To be sure, most efforts to form regimes are ultimately problem driven, and it is perfectly possible for the nature of problems to affect the success of negotiations, whether or not the participants are aware of such effects. Even so, the distinction between problems and projects is an important one. It reflects the realization that it is often possible to rally support for concrete projects presented as constructive initiatives in situations where an effort to reach agreement on the exact nature of the problem would run the risk of highlighting differences in the perspectives of the participants or emphasizing potential conflicts of interest in a manner detrimental to the progress of the negotiations. Similar observations are in order regarding efforts to influence the discourse in terms of which negotiators frame a problem in contrast to attempts to control the precise language to be included in a formal agreement. I do not mean to depreciate the importance of working out mutually agreeable language for inclusion in a convention, treaty, or ministerial declaration. Much time and energy were expended on such matters in connection with the Rovaniemi Declaration, the AEPS, and the Kirkenes Declaration, and these cases are surely typical in this regard. Nonetheless, the importance of discourse in connection with such negotiations cannot be over-

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looked.30 Thus, the debate between those attracted to the more expansive discourse of sustainable development and those committed to the more restrictive discourse of environmental protection was, in many ways, more fundamental to the process of negotiating the terms of the AEPS than the pulling and hauling regarding wording that took place at the Helsinki meeting in May 1991 and in Rovaniemi in the days immediately preceding the June 1991 ministerial. Much the same can be said of the effort to invent the Barents Region as a policy relevant area and to develop a discourse with which to discuss this region in contrast to debates over the specific language to be included in the Kirkenes Declaration.31 At the end of the day, success in the negotiation stage of regime formation occurs when parties find a mutually comprehensible language with which to communicate about the launching of a common project, however we as analysts choose to describe the nature of the underlying problem that stimulates the parties to act. Process Considerations The preceding sections make frequent references to process in seeking to understand the negotiation stories associated with the AEPS and the BEAR. But what is the nature of this process, and what factors stand out in our efforts to reconstruct the process of negotiation in these cases? In general terms, it seems accurate to characterize this process as a form of strategic interaction in which the participants are themselves collective entities containing factions whose views often diverge, making it difficult to speak with one voice.32 As this characterization suggests, the negotiation stage of regime formation is an interactive process in which actors pursuing their own interests (rather than some vague notion of the common good or the public interest) seek to avoid joint losses or to reap joint gains by working out the terms of social practices that will allow them to cooperate on an ongoing basis. A particularly fascinating feature of the resultant mixed-motive interactions in the context of regime formation arises from the fact that the outcome can and often will influence the way in which a set of human activities unfolds into the indefinite future. Small wonder then that students of institutional bargaining have devoted a great deal of time and energy to the study of process considerations in their 30. Litfin, Ozone Discourses. 31. See also Sverre Jervell, "The Barents Cooperation Initiative: Security in Northern Europe After the Cold War," in Goran Baecklund, ed., Common Security in Northern Europe After the Cold War, Stockholm: Olof Palme International Center, 1994, 78-90. 32. Robert D. Putnam, "Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games," International Organization 42 (1988): 427-60.

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efforts to account for successes and failures in efforts to create international regimes.33 In this section, I turn to these process considerations and direct particular attention to the actions of states and coalitions of states, the dynamics of two-level games, the roles of various nonstate actors, and the parts that key individuals play. In the process, I seek to add flesh and blood to the stories of the negotiation of the Rovaniemi Declaration, the AEPS, and the Kirkenes Declaration as I have presented them so far. Recent treatments of regime formation have introduced the categories of pushers or boosters and laggards in describing the roles states play in the process of institutional bargaining, and the cases under consideration here offer striking examples of both.34 Despite the fact that the AEPS is known as the Finnish Initiative, leadership shifted away from Finland during the negotiation stage. While Finland remained an advocate of the AEPS, Canada and the Soviet Union emerged as the most enthusiastic boosters of the project during the negotiation stage. Interestingly, at this point Sweden became an important deal maker—a role it was able to play effectively as an active member of the Arctic Eight at this stage, even though it was a member with less direct or immediate concerns about most of the specific issues addressed in the AEPS. Specifically, Sweden assumed a key role in the activities of the working group on the state of the Arctic environment and became lead country in developing the action plans on Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response (EPPR) and Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment (PAME). For its part, Norway's initial status as a laggard gave way during the course of the negotiation stage to a growing involvement—a result of the development of Norwegian interest in working out the terms of the action plan calling for the establishment of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP). The real laggard throughout the negotiation stage, then, was the United States. What is intriguing, in this regard, is that the other seven Arctic states simply forged ahead with the negotiations, indicating a willingness to accommodate American concerns on specific matters of wording but conveying a clear intention to proceed with the creation of the AEPS on one basis or another. Faced with this show of determination, the United States agreed, albeit reluctantly, to go along with the majority while generally maintaining a low profile in the negotiation process. The one area in which the United States did make a constructive contribution was in its insistence on opening up the Rovaniemi process not only to rep33. For a recent study that emphasizes such considerations, see Young and Osherenko, eds., Polar Politics. 34. Sprinz and Vaahtoranta, "The Interest-Based Explanation of International Environmental Policy."

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resentatives of the Arctic's indigenous peoples but also to representatives of other nonstate actors.35 The case of the BEAR presents a different story with regard to boosters and laggards. This project was a Norwegian initiative from start to finish at both the national and subnational levels. Norway found it useful to draw in Russia at an early stage, and the Russians responded affirmatively to this opportunity for reasons of their own. The real issue, then, was the need to engage Finland and Sweden in the creation of the BEAR. It is probably inaccurate to regard Finland and Sweden as laggards in the sense of being opposed to the creation of the BEAR. But Finnish representatives clearly saw the effort to create the BEAR as competing with their own efforts to expand the program of Adjacent Areas Cooperation under the North Calotte Committee, and the attention of Sweden was focused far more on the Baltic Sea Region than on developments in northern Fennoscandia.36 Beyond this, it is interesting to note the effort of the Norwegians to involve an array of others as a way of lending international credibility to the BEAR, and in some cases (for example, the EC Commission) even to persuade them to become signatories to the constitutive contract.37 Even so, there can be no doubt that the BEAR is fundamentally a four-party arrangement among Finland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden. Solid blocs, like the Group of 77 (the G-77) in the case of the new international economic order or the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in the case of climate change, did not emerge during the negotiation stage of the AEPS and the BEAR. Partly, this is a function of the fact that these were small-number negotiations in which each participant could play a distinct role. In part, it reflects the fact that each participant brought its own particular interests to the negotiations. At the same time, it is possible to identify several more informal alignments that did play a role of some significance in the negotiation of these regimes. Canada and the Soviet Union joined forces to provide momentum in the drive to reach agreement on the provisions of the AEPS—an alignment that makes sense given the fact that these countries have the largest Arctic domains and, as a result, the greatest interest in environmental protection in the Arctic. This alignment assumed particular importance as the initial skepticism of 35. It is particularly notable, in this connection, that the Department of State went to considerable lengths to solicit the views of environmental NGOs on drafts of the Rovaniemi Declaration and the AEPS itself. 36. Kvistad, "The Barents Spirit," chap. 5. On parallel efforts to strengthen cooperation in the Baltic Sea Region, see Kukk, Jervell, and Joenniemi, eds., The Baltic Sea Area. 37. To be clear, a representative of the Commission (not the Council) of the European Communities signed the Kirkenes Declaration. It would be inaccurate, therefore, to say that the EC itself became a participant in the BEAR.

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Norway began to dissipate, leaving the United States alone as a laggard in the process of developing the terms of the AEPS. In the case of the BEAR, as I have already indicated, the principal alignment involved the coordination of Norwegian and Russian efforts to push forward the idea of the Barents Region. Although it is undoubtedly true that the motivations underlying Norwegian and Russian actions in this regard were quite different, the impact of this alignment on the negotiating process was marked. In fact, the perception that the whole arrangement was little more than a Norwegian-Russian deal clearly affected the attitudes of Finnish and Swedish policymakers, not only toward the creation of the BEAR but also toward operationalizing its provisions in the period following the signing of the Kirkenes Declaration. With respect to the role of two-level games in the negotiation process, the cases under consideration here present a mixed picture.38 A few examples will serve to flesh out this observation. As the draft of the AEPS began to assume its final form during the early months of 1991, the U.S. State Department, which coordinated American participation in the preparatory meetings, realized the need to clear the texts of the Rovaniemi Declaration and the AEPS with a variety of domestic agencies. This triggered a process of clearing the documents both through interagency groups (for example, the Environmental Policy Review Group and the Policy Coordinating Process) and through a series of bilateral interactions with specific agencies.39 A number of significant concerns emerged from this process. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) conditioned its acceptance of American participation on assurance that this initiative would not require the allocation of new resources. Several agencies stressed their understanding that the documents would not impose legally binding commitments on the United States. Many agencies called for specific changes of wording in the declaration or the AEPS to clarify meanings, to limit their own responsibilities under the strategy, and, in a few cases, to increase the responsibilities of other signatories.40 Because this process occurred almost entirely during May and early June 1991, the result was a flurry of last-minute American initiatives that had to be accommodated right up to the beginning of the ministerial meeting on 13 June 1991. Needless to say, this development did not make the other participants in the negotiations happy, particularly given the Amer38. For a general treatment of two-level games, see Putnam, "Diplomacy and Domestic Politics." 39. See, for example, the letter from Michael R. Deland, chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, to E. U. Curtis Bohlen, assistant secretary of state, dated 3 June 1991 (on file with author). 40. Ibid.

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ican performance as a laggard throughout most of the negotiation stage. Nonetheless, the result was a striking eruption of two-level considerations that had lain dormant earlier in the negotiation stage because of the relatively low level of American interest in Arctic issues and the tendency of the State Department to handle the negotiations on its own. The case of the BEAR offers a different perspective on the nature of twolevel games. Whereas the development of the Norwegian Initiative had triggered a major controversy within the Foreign Ministry during the stage of agenda formation, the Norwegians pursued the negotiation of the terms of the Kirkenes Declaration in a remarkably single-minded fashion. Not only did the Foreign Ministry under Stoltenberg's direction push the process forward on many fronts, but other governmental agencies including the Environment Ministry and the governments of the northern counties joined the effort enthusiastically. In the case of the counties, this show of solidarity appears to have been aided by Stoltenberg's strong commitment to the idea of giving the counties a substantial role to play under the dual system coupled with the fact that Stoltenberg and Flotten, the governor of Finnmark and a strong advocate of the Norwegian Initiative, were members of the same political party.41 On the Russian side, the problem was more a matter of attracting the attention and interest of a central government preoccupied with all the concerns arising in the wake of the final disestablishment of the Soviet Union. Although the Barents Region was certainly an attractive proposition, especially in economic terms, the newly formed Yeltsin government faced a large agenda of pressing political concerns during 1992. This accounts for Stoltenberg's efforts to draw in Kozyrev in March and April and to secure Yeltsin's endorsement during the CSCE meeting in July. In effect, the problem was to line up a preoccupied central government behind an initiative of primary interest to a particular region. The cases of the AEPS and the BEAR do not lend much support to the vision of those who tout the role of nonstate actors in the formation of international regimes and see the actions of these players as the leading edge of the development of a global civil society.42 In the final analysis, the creation of both these regimes was an interstate affair. Yet this is not to deny the emergence of nonstate actors as visible participants in the negotiation of the AEPS and the BEAR. Present as members of national delegations from the start and accepted as observers in their own right beginning with the Yellowknife meeting in April 1990, the Arctic's indigenous peoples were able to use the negotiation of the AEPS to advance 41. For an account that contains numerous insights regarding the politics of the BEAR within Norway, see Kvistad, "The Barents Spirit." 42. Lipschutz, "Restructuring World Politics."

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their claims to consideration in the development of Arctic regimes.43 For their part, the environmental NGOs did not become active participants in Arctic affairs until late in the negotiation stage of the AEPS. But when they did surface in this arena, they did so with vigor, especially in the United States, which had called for an open process of negotiation from the beginning. What developed during May and June 1991 was a kind of three-level game in which the efforts of line agencies within the American government to limit commitments accepted under the terms of the AEPS were pitted against the efforts of groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth, and the Center for International Environmental Law to expand commitments by calling for a legally binding treaty and to build in more explicit assurances that nonstate actors would be accorded a meaningful role in connection with the implementation of the AEPS.44 It may be that this process within the United States owed a lot to the role of Curtis Bohlen, who presided over the American effort as assistant secretary of state for Oceans, International Environmental and Scientific Affairs but who maintained unusually close connections with the environmental NGOs.45 Whatever the explanation, the interaction between agency efforts to water down the commitments they would be asked to assume under the AEPS and NGO efforts to strengthen and expand these commitments is a striking feature of the later part of the negotiation stage in the case of the United States. With respect to the role of nonstate actors, the BEAR again offers an interesting contrast. Aside from a relatively modest role accorded to representatives of the Saami, the principal concern for nonstate actors during the negotiation stage in this case centered on the involvement of the subnational units of government that today form the membership of the Regional Council. In part, this selective concern for the interests of nonstate actors reflects the overtly political character of the Barents Region initiative and the dominant role of the foreign ministries in the negotiation process. Partly, it stems from the interest of the national governments in strengthening the regional political and economic systems of northern Fennoscan43. This initiated a process that led to two outcomes: a decision at the September 1993 AEPS ministerial meeting to create an Indigenous Peoples Secretariat within the AEPS, and a growing interest in the role of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in dealing with matters of environmental protection. 44. See, for example, letter from Susan J. Sabella, Durwood Zaelke, and Chris Wold to Raymond Arnaudo dated 3 May 1991 (on file with author). 45. Bohlen, who served as the chief American negotiator for the 1973 Convention on Polar Bears as an official of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, had been a vice president of the World Wildlife Fund prior to joining the Department of State during the Bush administration.

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dia and northwestern Russia. The result can hardly be read as offering much support for the argument of those who emphasize the growing role of nonstate actors in the realm of regime formation; the dominance of the foreign ministries was too clear-cut for that. Still, this case does add weight to the views of those who speak of the growing international role of subnational units of government, in contrast to the NGOs, as players in the processes leading to the creation of international regimes.46 No effort to characterize the negotiation process in the cases under consideration here can succeed without taking into account the roles played by key individuals in negotiating the terms of the AEPS and the BEAR. The most striking feature of the negotiation of the AEPS in this regard is the emerging role of the heads of delegations, particularly Alan Beesley of Canada, Sergei Zhuravlev of the Soviet Union, Desiree Edmar of Sweden, and Tom Gronberg of Finland. The HODs, as they came to call themselves, developed a sense of common purpose and worked together effectively to hammer out the terms of agreements once consensus began to emerge in the wake of the September 1989 meeting on the value of devising an environmental protection regime for the Arctic. This role, predominantly entrepreneurial in nature,47 loomed large in the process of negotiating the terms of the AEPS, especially given the fact that this initiative did not occupy a position of particularly high priority on the political agenda of the Foreign Ministry of any of the Arctic Eight during the negotiation stage. Under the circumstances, it is probably accurate to say that there would have been no AEPS in the absence of the dedication and entrepreneurial skill exhibited by the key HODs at a number of points during this stage. Beyond this, several individuals made critical contributions to the evolution of the AEPS by taking responsibility for producing negotiating texts and especially drafts of the AEPS with its explicit concern for the development of action plans. Without doubt, the most important member of this group was Garth Bangay, a member of the Canadian delegation who produced the first version of the AEPS in Yellowknife during the April 1990 meeting and continued to work on revised and expanded versions of the strategy during the ensuing months. In the case of the BEAR, the figure of Stoltenberg looms over every aspect of the negotiation process.48 It is important to note, however, that Stoltenberg's role during this phase differed from the role he played during the stage of agenda formation. Whereas he provided intellectual leadership 46. See, for example, Hocking, Localizing Foreign Policy. 47. On the contrast between entrepreneurial leadership and structural and intellectual leadership, see Young, "Political Leadership." 48. Kvistad, "The Barents Spirit."

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and ultimately the power to formulate Norwegian policy during the earlier stage, he became a tireless entrepreneur during the negotiation stage. In this connection, he gave numerous speeches explaining the logic of the initiative, organized seminars and meetings, and generally orchestrated the timing and flow of the preparatory meetings. This was clearly a diplomatic tour de force, and it is not surprising that Stoltenberg himself looks back on the signing of the Kirkenes Declaration as one of his proudest moments. Given the role of Stoltenberg and the consequent involvement of the foreign ministers of Russia, Finland, and Sweden, there was no parallel in this case to the role of the HODs in the negotiation of the AEPS. But taking into account the importance of the idea of the dual system in the structure of the BEAR, it is worth directing attention to the role that Flotten played during the negotiation stage. Because of his prominence at the county level, Flotten was able to draw in his peers among the leaders of other subnational units of government, just as Stoltenberg was able to bring on board his fellow foreign ministers. And because Stoltenberg and Flotten were philosophically and politically compatible, they succeeded in joining forces behind the design of the dual system, which in institutional terms is the most innovative and interesting feature of the regime for the Barents EuroArctic Region. Driving Forces Accounts of regime formation and, more specifically, of the negotiation stage of this process are marked by a sharp debate among those who emphasize power, ideas, or interests as the critical forces animating the process.49 Some of this debate is ideological in character in the sense that it rests on arguments that are not subject to empirical verification. But in other respects, each new case study presents an opportunity to add to our understanding of the relative significance of these driving social forces in explaining collective outcomes relating to the formation of international regimes. What insights can be derived from the stories of the negotiation stage in the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR that are relevant to this debate? These stories do not lend much support to the usual arguments regarding the role of power in regime formation. Although the matter is by no 49. See Haggard and Simmons, "Theories of International Regimes," 491-517; Oran R. Young and Gail Osherenko, "Testing Theories of Regime Formation: Findings from a Large Collaborative Research Project," in Rittberger, ed., Regime Theory and International Relations, 223-51; Andreas Hasenclever, Peter Mayer, and Volker Rittberger, "Interests-Power-Knowledge: The Study of International Regimes," Mershon International Studies Review 40 (October 1996): 177-228.

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means cut-and-dried, it is possible to view the United States as a hegemon in the case of the AEPS, especially with the progressive disintegration of the Soviet Union over the period 1989-91. But the United States was unquestionably a laggard during the negotiation stage of the AEPS, ultimately deciding to join the other members of the Arctic Eight in this initiative more from a desire not to be left out than from any enthusiasm for the creation of the new regime itself. Nor is the leadership provided by Canada, Finland, and Sweden in this case subject to interpretation in terms of considerations of power. In the case of the negotiations leading to the Kirkenes Declaration, no participant was able or willing to act as a hegemon. Arguably, in fact, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the weakness of Russia as a successor state facilitated efforts to negotiate the terms of the BEAR by alleviating Norway's traditional fears of entering into highly asymmetrical relations with a superpower neighbor.50 The conclusions to be drawn from these cases with respect to other propositions about the role of power in institutional bargaining are also largely negative. Although the number of parties was relatively small in both instances, there is nothing in these cases to support the idea that bilateral negotiations are typically easier to handle successfully than multilateral negotiations.51 Given the striking differences among the actors along a variety of dimensions, the negotiations leading to the AEPS and the BEAR do not reinforce the idea that a balance of power or some rough parity is conducive to success in institutional bargaining. Nor do these cases lend weight to the argument that the presence of a bloc or leading coalition is needed to make progress in institutional bargaining. True, the informal alignment of Norway and Russia played a role of some significance in the negotiations leading to the Kirkenes Declaration. But nothing of the kind occurred in the case of the AEPS. The leadership of Canada, the Soviet Union, and Sweden in this case emerged in the aftermath of the September 1989 meeting in Rovaniemi and never took the form of a real alliance. None of this is meant to imply that power is irrelevant to the process of institutional bargaining. But it is clearly a subtle force that is not captured well in the arguments about power embedded in the existing literature on regime formation. Somewhat similar observations are in order regarding the role of ideas during the negotiation stage of the AEPS and the BEAR. As I argued in 50. On the political calculations underlying the BEAR, see the essays by Hoist and Kozyrev in Stokke and Tunander, eds., The Barents Region. 51. On the logic of this argument, see Kenneth A. Oye, "Explaining Cooperation Under Anarchy: Hypotheses and Strategies," in Kenneth A. Oye, ed., Cooperation Under Anarchy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986, 1-24.

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Chapter 3, cognitive factors figured prominently in the agenda formation stage of both cases. This is particularly true of the BEAR where it was necessary to invent the idea of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region and to differentiate it from the concept of the North Calotte. But the familiar arguments about ideas find little support in the negotiation stage of these cases. The emergence of consensual knowledge was not a prime feature of these negotiations. Rather, the AEPS evolved as a package deal containing distinct provisions responsive to the concerns of different constituencies, and the BEAR took shape as a complex initiative attractive to various participants for different reasons. It is difficult also to find epistemic communities at work in these cases. Several unofficial working groups did play a role during the late 1980s in promoting the idea of the Arctic as a policy relevant region and in exploring options for constructive responses to Gorbachev's Murmansk initiative.52 And the Norwegian government enlisted members of the research community in its effort to invent and publicize the idea of the Barents Region. Nonetheless, it would be a stretch in either case to turn these efforts into the activities of one or more epistemic communities. It is significant that broader considerations of discourse loomed large in connection with these negotiations. In the case of the AEPS, the debate concerning whether to adopt the expansive discourse of sustainable development or the more focused and familiar discourse of environmental protection was only resolved in favor of the latter during the negotiation stage.53 For its part, the drive to negotiate the terms of the BEAR was clearly fueled by the vision of a Europe of Regions arising in connection with the 1992 Maastricht Treaty but still sufficiently vague to accommodate a variety of perspectives and approaches.54 In the final analysis, the negotiation stage in both cases is best understood as a process of interactive decisionmaking among parties with relatively clear views regarding their own interests. What can we say about the strategic properties of the resultant interactions? Is it possible to discover sources of bargaining leverage in the underlying configuration of in52. Arguably, the group that came closest to operating as an epistemic community in this context was the Working Group on Arctic International Relations, which provided a meeting ground during the late 1980s and early 1990s for scholars and practitioners from all of the Arctic states concerned with international cooperation in the Circumpolar North. 53. Interestingly, the idea of sustainable development has recently reemerged as a guiding perspective for the AEPS. The second AEPS ministerial meeting, which took place in Greenland during September 1993, acted to establish a Task Force on Sustainable Development and Utilization; the third AEPS ministerial meeting, which convened in Canada during March 1996, upgraded the task force to a working group. 54. Signed on 7 February 1992 and known officially as the Treaty of European Union, this agreement provides for the establishment of a Committee on Regions.

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terests in these cases?55 There are no easy answers to these questions. Yet one observation that does stand out in both cases concerns the importance of finding formulas agreeable to all parties. The concept of the Arctic Eight in the case of the AEPS would have been irreparably damaged if any one of the eight states had refused to sign onto the AEPS. This fact, more than any consideration of power in the material sense, accounts for the willingness of the other seven to accommodate the concerns of the United States in framing the provisions of the AEPS. By the same token, the BEAR would have been a nonstarter in the absence of Finland and Sweden as full members. This accounts for Stoltenberg's energetic effort to attract the support of these parties during the fall of 1992 as well as for certain adjustments, like the inclusion of Karelia, in the immediate aftermath of the signing of the Kirkenes Declaration.56 In fact, Stoltenberg worked hard to include others either as signatories to the declaration (for example, Denmark, Iceland, and the EC Commission) or as observers (for instance, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States). But it is clear that solidarity among Finland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden was the sine qua non for launching the BEAR. At the same time, the negotiation stories of the AEPS and the BEAR yield a number of more specific observations regarding the role of interests in institutional bargaining. Interests may be negative as well as positive. As illustrated by the case of American participation in the AEPS, parties may be motivated to join a regime as much by a desire not to be left out as by a more positive interest in the joint gains expected to flow from the creation of the regime. Perceived interests may be just as effective in driving the actions of participants in institutional bargaining as real interests. To illustrate, recent analyses have raised a number of questions about the scale of transboundary fluxes of airborne pollutants in northern Fennoscandia and about the magnitude of their impact on the health of Finland's northern forest ecosystems.57 But it is hard to deny the role of the perceived threat associated with emissions from industrial facilities located on the Kola Peninsula as a force behind Finland's participation in the negotiation of the AEPS. It is apparent also that combinations of different but complementary interests 55. For a review of the various sources of bargaining leverage in international negotiations, see Young, International Governance, chap. 5. 56. Since Finland shares a long border with the Autonomous Republic of Karelia, the addition of Karelia to the BEAR membership immediately raised the stakes for Finland with regard to the performance of the Barents Region initiative. 57. On the impact of sulfur dioxide emissions from the Kola Peninsula, see JuhaPekka Tuovinen, Tuomas Laurila, Heikka Lattila, Alexey Ryaboshapko, Petr Brukhanov, and Sergey Korolev, "Impact of the Sulphur Dioxide Sources in the Kola Peninsula on Air Quality in Northernmost Europe," Atmospheric Environment 27A (1993), 1379-95.

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may be just as effective as common interests in driving institutional bargaining toward success. In the case of the BEAR, for instance, Norwegian interests were predominantly environmental and geopolitical, whereas Russian interests were first and foremost economic in character. But because their interests were fundamentally complementary, the two countries found it possible to join forces as leaders in the negotiation of the BEAR. Finally, these cases reinforce the conception of institutional bargaining as a process involving commitment to a common project coupled with a good deal of pulling and hauling over specific provisions fueled by divergent interests. The important thing to note in this connection, however, is that the result is generally agreement on the highest common denominator rather than the lowest common denominator as some commentators have suggested. The recent literature on regime formation has suggested that contextual factors can influence the course of the negotiation stage either by reinforcing the momentum of the bargaining process or by derailing the process.58 For the most part, the reference here is to specific events, as opposed to larger, structural developments like the end of the Cold War or the collapse of the Soviet Union. The negotiation stories at hand do offer some interesting examples of the impact of such contextual factors. In the case of the AEPS, it seems clear that the signing of the founding articles of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) in August 1990 and the launching of the Northern Forum in September 1990 helped to energize a process that was already well under way in the aftermath of the Yellowknife preparatory meeting. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that the onset of the Gulf War and the violent confrontation in Vilnius between Soviet troops and Lithuania protesters, which coincided with the January 1991 preparatory meeting, did not detract from the achievement of success at Kiruna. The most striking observation about context in the case of the BEAR, by contrast, concerns the timing of the negotiations in relation to events unfolding in Russia. The negotiation stage began in the aftermath of the final collapse of the Soviet Union and in a setting in which the new Russian government had a strong interest in achieving international credibility. By the same token, the signing of the declaration at Kirkenes occurred before the turning inward later in 1993 that eventuated in Yeltsin's confrontation with the Russian parliament in October. In effect, the negotiation stage in the case of the BEAR led a charmed life with regard to potentially disruptive contextual forces. Needless to say, it is pointless to search for a master variable in thinking about the driving forces leading to the Rovaniemi Declaration in June 58. See Young and Osherenko, eds., Polar Politics.

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1991 and the Kirkenes Declaration in January 1993. The process of institutional bargaining is a complex one in which a number of forces interact with each other continuously. In the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR, however, we are confronted with relatively traditional processes featuring negotiations among representatives of states possessing reasonably clear interests in the issues at hand. This does not imply that those who emphasize the growing role of nonstate actors and unconventional processes in connection with regime formation are wrong.59 No doubt we can expect to encounter a good deal of variation among individual cases of regime formation in these terms. But it does seems clear that it would be a mistake to ignore the role of traditional interstate politics that lies at the heart of many, perhaps most, cases of regime formation. The creation stories under consideration here suggest that this core is likely to be particularly prominent during the negotiation stage of regime formation. The Political Dynamic of Negotiation To conclude this account of the roads to Rovaniemi and Kirkenes, let me return to Chapter 1's hypotheses about the political dynamics of regime formation in the light of the preceding analysis of the negotiation stage in the formation of the AEPS and the BEAR. I have portrayed the entire process of establishing international regimes as one involving a large element of interactive decisionmaking among self-interested actors. Yet the cases indicate that this aspect of the process is accentuated during the negotiation stage. Efforts to bring structural power to bear were not a salient feature of the negotiations leading to Rovaniemi and Kirkenes. The evidence suggests that intensity of interest was a considerably more important source of influence than structural power in the interactive effort to frame the provisions of the AEPS and the BEAR. Similarly, cognitive factors played a reduced role during the negotiation stage as compared with the stage of agenda formation preceding it. This is not to say that ideas had no part in driving the negotiations centered on the framing of the Rovaniemi Declaration (and the AEPS that accompanies it) and the Kirkenes Declaration. The continuing debate regarding the relative merits of casting the AEPS as a matter of environmental protection or as an issue of sustainable development, for example, was by no means trivial. But in both cases, the basic discourse used in discussing the provisions of the constitutive documents was set during the stage of agenda formation. It is hardly surprising, then, 59. See, for example, Paul Wapner, "Politics Beyond the State: Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics," World Politics 47 (April 1995): 311-40.

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that ideas loomed larger as a driving force during the earlier stage than during the stage of negotiation. What remains is an interest-driven process among actors possessing relatively clear conceptions of their own interests. Nonetheless, the nature of the negotiations leading to the Rovaniemi and Kirkenes Declarations differs substantially from the type of bargaining envisioned in most studies of strategic interaction. Institutional bargaining is not dominated by the use of threats, promises, and committal tactics on the part of actors seeking solutions at favorable points on contract curves or Pareto frontiers whose locus is generally known.60 Nor is it fundamentally a learning process in which the parties engage in integrative or productive interactions intended to identify new opportunities to reap joint gains. If the AEPS and the BEAR are reasonable guides in this regard, the negotiation stage of regime formation is a process of designing institutional projects in a manner that seems responsive to the problems that lead to agenda formation and that accommodates the most pressing concerns of the key participants. The normal vehicle for energizing this process is the development of a negotiating text that is subject to refinement through a succession of preparatory meetings and that typically embodies a range of compromises needed to satisfy the needs of key participants. The negotiation stage of the AEPS and the BEAR was predominantly an interstate affair. Even so, it is interesting to observe in these cases the operation of a variety of devices intended to accord a voice to nonstate actors without limiting the authority of the national government to act in the name of the state. Some of the participating states (the United States in the case of the AEPS is a prominent example) made an explicit effort to obtain input from relevant interest groups as the AEPS and the BEAR began to take definite shape. A number of the parties included representatives of subnational units of government, indigenous peoples, and environmental groups in the delegations they sent to the preparatory meetings. Nonstate actors were accepted as observers starting with the April 1990 Yellowknife meeting in the case of the AEPS and through much of the negotiation stage in the case of the BEAR. Foreign ministry officials made particularly strong efforts to consult the leaders of the relevant subnational units of government in the case of the BEAR, where the idea of the dual system emerged as an important institutional innovation. With regard to the leadership of individuals, the cases confirm the expectation that entrepreneurial activities dominate the negotiation stage. 60. For a well-known account of threats, promises, and committal tactics, see Schelling, Strategy of Conflict. An essay that applies this traditional perspective to contemporary international issues is Krasner, "Global Communications and National Power."

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The most influential HODs (for example, Beesley, Edmar, Gronberg, Zhuravlev) all exercised influence in the case of the AEPS by working to keep the momentum flowing and to devise ways of overcoming snags arising in the bargaining process. Bangay, the Canadian who crafted much of the text of the AEPS, played a classic entrepreneurial role in searching for language that would meet the needs of all the players. A particularly striking observation in this regard concerns Stoltenberg's role during the negotiation stage of the BEAR. Whereas Stoltenberg had used structural power to move the Norwegian Initiative to the top of the political agenda and to trigger the shift from agenda formation to negotiation, he became a tireless entrepreneur during the negotiation stage itself. He promoted the idea in numerous speeches, made deals with key players within Norway as well as internationally, and orchestrated the preparatory activities in such a way as to maximize the prospects for success. The fact that the same individual shifted from structural to entrepreneurial leadership with the onset of negotiations is a clear indication of the importance of entrepreneurship in the context of institutional bargaining. When it comes to collective-action problems, it appears from these cases that the negotiation stage has a distinctive dynamic of its own but that this dynamic is not captured well in the concepts of gridlock and stalemate that are common in mainstream accounts of bargaining. The essence of this dynamic centers on the development and maintenance of momentum and on the exercise of political will needed to draw the less enthusiastic parties into the process in such a way as to ensure that momentum is not lost. In most political settings, momentum tends to dissipate, due to the efforts of others to launch projects dealing with different problems or to the diversionary effects of events occurring in other arenas. The realm of international affairs is certainly no exception in these terms. It will come as no surprise, therefore, that international history is littered with seemingly promising projects that lost momentum and petered out before producing outcomes of lasting significance. In a sense, this feature of the negotiation stage is linked to the important role that entrepreneurs play in institutional bargaining. Thus, the cases under consideration here reinforce the observation that effective entrepreneurial leaders are specialists in political momentum who are skilled in the use of a wide range of techniques for maintaining a sense of movement in negotiations aimed at reaching agreement on a convention, treaty, declaration, or action plan setting forth the major provisions of international regimes. Without doubt, both the AEPS and the BEAR are products of the general increase in interest in Arctic cooperation associated with the end of the Cold War and the transition from the Soviet Union to Russia. But as

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expected, more specific exogenous events played roles of some significance during the negotiations leading to the Rovaniemi and Kirkenes Declarations. The negotiations leading to Rovaniemi in June 1991 survived the outbreak of the Gulf War and the confrontation in Vilnius during January 1991 and came to a successful conclusion before the attempted coup of August 1991 in Moscow. For their part, the negotiations leading to Kirkenes in January 1993 began after the Russian Federation emerged as the relevant actor to represent the eastern part of the Barents Region and reached closure before the onset of the internal political problems hampering Russia later in the year. What this suggests is not that exogenous events are unimportant as determinants of the course of institutional bargaining but rather that the timing of the negotiation stage in both cases under consideration was fortuitous as far as the impact of such events is concerned. It follows from what I have already said both that the tactics of the negotiation stage are distinctive and that familiar ideas about committal tactics, threats, and promises are not particularly helpful in understanding the process of hammering out the details of constitutive contracts. It is undoubtedly fair to say that the cases under consideration here should not be taken to represent the universe of cases with regard to institutional bargaining. By contrast with the dynamics in familiar cases like ozone depletion or climate change, for example, the laggards on the roads to Rovaniemi and Kirkenes were merely lukewarm participants rather than open opponents of ideas emphasized by the pushers. Thus, it is reasonable to expect that institutional bargaining will sometimes take on a more coercive cast than the process described in the cases examined here. Even so, there is no doubt that the tactics characteristic of the negotiation stage are distinctive. They revolve around the need to devise formulas that professional negotiators will regard as suitable for inclusion in agreed texts in contrast to efforts to frame the generative ideas underlying a project in a manner appealing to a broad public or to find ways to engage the interest of agency personnel in adding the programmatic activities called for under the terms of an agreement to workloads that leave little room for innovation. Finally, the negotiation stories recounted in this chapter suggest two major observations regarding design perspectives. To begin with, those charged with translating the ideas underlying projects into detailed negotiating texts typically look to preexisting arrangements in search of institutional models—especially models of organizational structures—suitable for use in new regimes. In cases where key players are attracted to different models, debates about the relative merits of alternative structures can become a prominent feature of the negotiation stage. In this connection, it seems important to avoid premature commitments to specific models, to consider the virtues

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of choosing elements from a number of different models, and to adopt procedures intended to canvas the options quite systematically before making commitments to specific options. This is why the creation of mechanisms, like the second working group set up in Rovaniemi in September 1989, to examine "existing international legal instruments . . . and the organization of future co-operation" is a common occurrence in institutional bargaining. Beyond this, the negotiation stage involves a process in which efforts to arrive at compromises and to accommodate the most pressing concerns of a range of participants are pervasive. Accordingly, the emergence of complex packages containing excessive ambiguity or internal contradictions is a standard pitfall of this stage of regime formation. It is therefore of great importance to keep an eye firmly fixed on the essential integrity of the project in order to achieve real success, in contrast to success on paper in institutional bargaining. In the cases at hand, that meant never losing track of the role of the action plans in the case of the AEPS and the dual system in the case of the BEAR, both of which emerged as the major institutional innovations in forming these regimes.

CHAPTER

FIVE

Operationalization: Activating the AEPS and the BEAR

B

oth the signing of a ministerial declaration and the adoption of an international action plan are significant steps. Yet they do not guarantee that the negotiation of an agreement spelling out the defining features of an international regime will give rise to a social practice of substance or, to put it epigrammatically, that the transition from paper to practice will occur without a hitch.1 The history of international affairs is littered with agreements reflecting good intentions on the part of their signatories that have nonetheless turned out to be stillborn and ended up as dead letters. In other cases, initial agreements are operationalized selectively, so that the resultant social practices differ materially from the visions their designers sought to articulate during the negotiation stage. Even when those responsible for Operationalization make a good faith effort to put the intentions of a regime's designers into practice, moreover, the relationship between the blueprints for the regime articulated on paper and what it looks like in practice is often tenuous. The fundamental source of these phenomena is easy enough to identify. The stage of Operationalization is not a technical affair but a political process much like the other stages of regime formation, and it has a distinctive dynamic of its own. Under the circumstances, it will come as no surprise that the gap between the ideal and the actual is typically every bit as large with regard to international regimes as it is in connection with other classes of social institutions. To be more specific, however, the cases of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR) offer an excellent opportunity to examine several features of the Operationalization process that have not been studied systematically in the literature on international regimes. Perhaps because of a tendency to focus on legally binding agreements and an understandable preoccupation with the American role in the creation of postwar regimes, those who think about Operationalization typically concentrate on the politics of ratification. Yet both the AEPS and 1. The phrase "from paper to practice" is Ronald Mitchell's. See Mitchell, Intentional Oil Pollution at Sea.

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the BEAR are soft law arrangements created under the terms of executive agreements not requiring formal ratification.2 As a result, the political dynamic of operationalization in these cases features the administrative and bureaucratic politics characteristic of executive branch activities in contrast to the legislative politics that are so prominent in connection with controversies over the ratification of conventions or treaties.3 What is more, both the AEPS and the BEAR constitute regimes that are largely programmatic in character; they focus on the coordination of activities undertaken to fulfill obligations pertaining to joint projects rather than on the promulgation of regulatory measures intended to guide the behavior of various classes of subjects. It follows that efforts to translate general rules into operational guidelines and to establish compliance mechanisms capable of ensuring that subjects conform to them, both topics of current interest among students of regime implementation, are not the central focus of attention in analyzing the operationalization of these regimes.4 Instead, the action in these cases centers on refining the mandates of specific programs, creating machinery to carry out these mandates, and finding the resources needed to fulfill commitments undertaken in connection with specific projects. In this chapter, I present detailed accounts of the operationalization of the AEPS and the BEAR. The first substantive section outlines the operationalization timetables for the two cases and, in the process, comments on the problems of determining when the operationalization stage ends and the period of normal or routine operation begins. This is followed by a section that deals with operationalization at the international level and that directs particular attention to issues associated with putting the necessary international machinery into place. The focus shifts in the next section to a general account of operationalization at the domestic level that probes the roles of administrative, bureaucratic, budgetary, and advocacy politics in determining the degree to which international agreements are taken seriously in the internal political processes of the member states. A related section sketches out a series of vignettes that describe the handling of the AEPS and the BEAR in some of the individual member countries and therefore allow for a more nuanced treatment of the domestic politics 2. For an analysis that discusses a variety of reasons why governments sometimes choose to articulate their agreements in informal and/or legally nonbinding forms, see Lipson, "Why Are Some International Agreements Informal?" 495-538. 3. For a seminal account of bureaucratic politics, see Allison, Essence of Decision. 4. For sophisticated accounts that do focus on issues of compliance, see Harold K. Jacobson and Edith Brown Weiss, "Strengthening Compliance with International Environmental Accords," Global Governance 1 (June 1995): 119-48; and Chayes and Chayes, The New Sovereignty.

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of operationalization. The chapter's final section returns once again to the hypotheses about the political dynamics of regime formation articulated in Chapter 1 and asks how they fare in the light of the accounts of operationalization set forth in the preceding sections. The key findings of this analysis can be stated as follows. Operationalization occurs at two levels—international and domestic—and the central issues surrounding this stage of regime formation differ from one level to the other. At the international level, the fundamental problems revolve around machinery and funding. Because the AEPS and the BEAR are largely programmatic regimes, they require the creation of ongoing organizational arrangements (e.g., AMAP) and the allocation of funds for joint projects (e.g., the various elements of the Barents Programme) to achieve their goals. But the tendency to redirect attention from the international interactions of the negotiation stage to the domestic processes of the operationalization stage can easily lead to a situation in which the needs of the international component of operationalization fall through the cracks. At the domestic level, the operationalization of programmatic arrangements like the AEPS and the BEAR typically expands the field to include a number of actors located outside the Foreign Ministry. This triggers a process within the executive branch of government featuring a complex mix of administrative politics centering on the allocation of authority among line agencies, bureaucratic politics turning on efforts to promote broader agency interests in connection with efforts on behalf of the regime, budgetary politics revolving around efforts to obtain the funds needed to fulfill international commitments, and advocacy politics involving relations between government agencies and outside interest groups. Although differences in institutional structures and political cultures ensure that there will be considerable variation among member countries regarding such matters, the fundamental forces affecting the operationalization of programmatic regimes are clearly recognizable from one country to another. Operationalization Timetables Any analysis of the operationalization stage of regime formation immediately runs into a problem that is a mirror image of the problem confronting those concerned with agenda formation. The beginning of this stage is easy to identify with precision. The stage of operationalization began on 14 June 1991 for the AEPS and on 11 January 1993 for the BEAR. But when does this stage come to an end? Conceptually, the distinction between operationalization and routine operation is reasonably clear. The former refers to the process of setting a regime in motion or of getting its principal elements up

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and running, whereas the latter focuses on the routine processes involved in the operation of the regime on a day-to-day or year-to-year basis. Yet it soon becomes apparent that actual cases are typically more complex than this simple distinction would lead one to believe. A glance at the Operationalization timelines for the AEPS and the BEAR laid out in Tables 5.1 and 5.2 will help to clarify this observation. The components of a regime are often operationalized piecemeal over a more or less protracted period of time. In the case of the AEPS, for example, the parties took vigorous Table 5.1 Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) Operationalization timeline 14 June 1991 2-6 December 1991 13 March 1992 7-9 April 1992 23-24 April 1992 August 1992 12-15 October 1992 29 November-4 December 1992 12-14 May 1993 25-27 May 1993 14-16 September 1993 11-15 October 1993 January 1994 3-5 May 1994 10-12 May 1994 27 June-1 July 1994 30-31 August 1994 20-23 September 1994 26-28 September 1994 26-28 October 1994 16 February 1995 13-14 March 1995 15-17 March 1995

First AEPS ministerial meeting First AMAP Task Force meeting (Tromso) EPPR preparatory meeting (Stockholm) First CAFF Working Group meeting (Ottawa) Heads of delegations meeting (Copenhagen) AMAP Secretariat established (Oslo) EPPR experts meeting (Lulea) Second AMAP Task Force meeting (Toronto) Third AMAP Task Force meeting (Stockholm) Second CAFF Working Group meeting (Fairbanks) Second AEPS ministerial meeting (Nuuk) Fourth AMAP Task Force meeting (Reykjavik) CAFF Secretariat established (Ottawa) First PAME Working Group meeting (Oslo) SAAOs meeting (Carling Lake) First formal EPPR Working Group meeting (Anchorage) First Sustainable Development Task Force meeting (Yellowknife) Seminar on Integration of Indigenous Peoples Knowledge (Reykjavik) Third CAFF Working Group meeting (Reykjavik) Sixth AMAP Task Force meeting (Washington) Indigenous Peoples Secretariat opened officially in Copenhagen Second Sustainable Development Task Force meeting (Iqaluit) SAAOs meeting (Iqaluit)

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steps to operationalize the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) quite soon after the signing of the Rovaniemi Declaration. But the Working Group on the Prot ion of the Arctic Marine Environment did not have its first formal session until May 1994. In the case of the BEAR, by contrast, the parties focused first on the task of getting the machinery of the Regional Council up and running, leaving the details of the Barents Euro-Arctic Council to be worked out later. As a result, the second fullscale session of the Barents Council—the Kirkenes meeting in January 1993 counted as the first session—did not take place until mid-September 1994. Table 5.2 Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR) operationalization timeline 11 January 1993 11 January 1993 22 March 1993 22-23 April 1993 25 June 1993 31 August-1 September 1993 8 September 1993 October 1993 23-24 February 1994 12-13 April 1994 15 June 1994 16-1 7 June 1994 27-28 June 1994 14-15 September 1994

20-22 September 1994 19-20 January 1995

January 1995

First meeting of Barents Euro-Arctic Council (Kirkenes) First Regional Council meeting (Kirkenes) Karelia becomes a member of the Regional Council Regional Council meeting (Murmansk) CSO meeting (Oslo) —quarterly meetings thereafter Meeting of ministers of culture of the Barents Region (Kirkenes) Meeting of ministers of transport and communications of the Barents Region (Alta) Kirkenes Secretariat established Regional Council meeting (Archangel) Meeting of ministers of health of the Barents Region (Bodo) Meeting of environment ministers of the Barents Region and adoption of Environmental Action Programme (Bodo) First conference of indigenous peoples of the Barents Region (Bodo) Regional Council meeting (Rovaniemi) Second meeting of the Barents Euro-Arctic Council jointly with Regional Council meeting (Tromso) • adoption of Barents Programme • chairmanship of Barents Euro-Arctic Council shifts from Norway to Finland for one year Barents Region's Assembly of Parliamentarians (Kirkenes) Regional Council meeting (Kirkenes) • chairmanship of Regional Council shifts from Norway to Sweden for two years Lulea Secretariat established

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Most social practices evolve on a more or less continuous basis, so the idea of a sharp break between Operationalization and routine operation is hard to maintain. Looking again at the AEPS timeline, for instance, we see not only the emergence within the first year of the essential idea of the Senior Arctic Affairs Officials (SAAOs)—a development not anticipated in the Rovaniemi Declaration—but also the creation of an Indigenous Peoples Secretariat and a Task Force on Sustainable Development and Utilization as products of the second ministerial meeting held in Nuuk, Greenland, during September 1993. Such developments are perfectly normal in connection with international regimes, but they create a situation in which there is an inevitable element of arbitrariness in efforts to designate a specific breakpoint between the end of the stage of Operationalization and the beginning of a period of routine operation. Nevertheless, the Operationalization timetables of the AEPS and the BEAR can still be described in a broad outline. Efforts to breathe life into the AEPS focused, first and foremost, on activating the four programmatic initiatives included in the action plan adopted in the Rovaniemi Declaration and described in more detail in the accompanying Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy. But what emerges from an examination of the record is a striking pattern of variance in the timing of efforts to mobilize these programs (see Table 5.1). Not surprisingly, given its centrality to the guiding vision of the AEPS together with the announcement of Norway's willingness to provide a secretariat contained in the Rovaniemi Declaration itself, the AMAP was the first element of the AEPS Action Plan to become operational. Meeting in Tromso in December 1991, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Task Force (AMATF) chose Heikki Sisula of Finland's Environment Ministry as its chair and David Stone of Environment Canada as vice chair; the Task Force confirmed that the AMAP should give priority to producing a comprehensive "State of the Arctic Environment Report" for consideration at an AEPS ministerial meeting by 1996. With Norwegian support, Lars-Otto Reierson, a member of the staff of the Office of Oil and Offshore Activities located in Norway's State Pollution Control Authority, was selected to head the AMAP Secretariat, and the secretariat itself began to function in Oslo during the summer of 1992. A second meeting of the AMATF in Toronto during December 1992 reconfirmed the course that the AMAP had set for itself during the preceding year. The fate of the other elements of the action plan was more difficult to anticipate from the outset. Largely due to an investment of energy and resources on the part of Canada, the Working Group on the Conservation on Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF) was the next component of the action plan to get off the ground. Meeting in Ottawa during April 1992 and again

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in Fairbanks during May 1993, the CAFF Working Group developed an initial interest in the management of protected natural areas and in the contribution of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) to initiatives aimed at protecting Arctic wildlife.5 A CAFF Secretariat was established in Ottawa during January 1994. Despite the organization of a preparatory meeting in Stockholm during March 1992 and a larger meeting of experts in Lulea the following October, the first formal meeting of the Working Group on Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response (EPPR) did not take place until the United States hosted a session in Anchorage at the end of June and beginning of July 1994. No action at all was taken with regard to the element of the action plan dealing with Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment (PAME) until almost three years after the signing of the Rovaniemi Declaration. The first meeting of the PAME Working Group finally took place in Oslo during May 1994, largely as a result of Norwegian initiative. The other notable feature of the process of operationalizing the AEPS emerged from the need to provide oversight, policy guidance, and advance planning for ministerials on an ongoing basis. The Rovaniemi Declaration envisions a procedure under which these functions are to be handled as a part of the biennial ministerial meetings. But it soon became apparent that this procedure would not be adequate to the task at hand. Under the circumstances, the parties chose to build on a device that had proved helpful during the negotiation stage and organized a heads of delegations meeting in Copenhagen during April 1992. This session was clearly a forerunner of the meetings of Senior Arctic Affairs Officials (SAAOs) that have since become a regular feature of the Rovaniemi process. To be specific, what has emerged is a procedure under which the SAAOs meet at least once and sometimes several times between ministerial meetings to review progress regarding the various elements of the AEPS Action Plan and to provide guidance in implementing policy decisions taken at the ministerial meetings. Unanticipated in June 1991, the development of this mechanism constitutes a major innovation arising from the process of operationalizing the AEPS. The second AEPS ministerial—the June 1991 meeting in Rovaniemi counted as the first—took place in Nuuk from 14 to 16 September 1993. On balance, it seems reasonable to treat this meeting, which confirmed the development of the AEPS as a going concern and laid the groundwork for several important institutional innovations (e.g., the creation of a Task 5. Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF), The State of Protected Areas in the Circumpolar Arctic 1994, CAFF Habitat Conservation Report No. 1, Directorate for Nature Management, Trondheim, Norway.

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Force on Sustainable Development and Utilization), as the natural terminus of the Operationalization stage of this case of regime formation. Even so, identifying the Nuuk ministerial as the point of transition from Operationalization to routine operation of the environmental protection regime for the Arctic is not without an element of arbitrariness. The first formal sessions of the FAME and EPPR Working Groups did not occur until well after the Nuuk ministerial. Equally important, the Nuuk meeting set in motion several developments leading to changes in the character of the regime that have proven quite significant over the course of time. The Operationalization of the BEAR took a somewhat different, though by no means contradictory, course. Perhaps because this arrangement involved inventing a region, proceeding in a number of functional areas at once, and coming to terms with the practical implications of the dual system, efforts to operationalize the BEAR centered on the work of the two councils, in contrast to the focus in the case of the AEPS on the substantive elements of a well-defined action plan (see Table 5.2). The Regional Council got off to a brisk start, holding meetings in Murmansk in April 1993 and Archangel in February 1994. With funding provided by Norway, a secretariat for the Regional Council began operations in Kirkenes in October 1993; Oddrunn Pettersen, a political figure who had been a member of the Norwegian Parliament and held several cabinet posts, became the head of the Kirkenes Secretariat. Under the circumstances, the Regional Council soon reached a point where it could get started on the process of identifying a portfolio of projects suitable for eventual inclusion in a Barents Programme. The Operationalization of the Barents Euro-Arctic Council followed a path of its own. The Committee of Senior Officials (CSO) met in Oslo in June 1993; this group, which is somewhat analogous to the SAAOs of the AEPS, has met at regular intervals since then. Norway also set up a secretariat for the Barents Council within the Norwegian Foreign Ministry headed by Karsten Klepsvik, who has been described as Stoltenberg's general for Operationalization of the BEAR.6 Otherwise, the Barents Council, rather than hold formal meetings of the council itself, promoted a series of gatherings of issue area ministers. The BEAR ministers of culture met in Kirkenes from 31 August to 1 September 1993, the ministers of transportation met in Aha on 6 September 1993, the ministers of health convened in Bodo from 12 to 13 April 1994, and the environment ministers gathered in Bodo on 15 June 1994. It is fair to say that these meetings played a significant role as part of a process of reestablishing connections 6. Kvistad, "The Barents Spirit," 90.

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in an area that had long been bifurcated by the Cold War and of identifying opportunities for the initiation of mutually beneficial projects. Additionally, this approach seems to have reflected a deliberate policy on the part of Stoltenberg and his successor as Norwegian foreign minister, Johan J0rgen Hoist, of leaving the foreground to the Regional Council and keeping the Barents Council in the background.7 Even so, the lack of formal action on the part of the Barents Council was viewed by some observers as a sign that the operationalization of the BEAR was running into trouble. It seems appropriate to treat the joint meeting of the Regional Council and the Barents Euro-Arctic Council that took place in Tromso from 14 to 15 September 1994 as the dividing line between operationalization and routine operation in the case of the BEAR. At this meeting, the members adopted the Barents Programme, a compendium of some eighty-four individual projects arising from the work of ten functionally defined committees working under the auspices of the Regional Council.8 Although some have criticized this document as little more than a wish list lacking any clear priorities or firm commitments of resources, the adoption of the Barents Programme does mark the onset of a period dominated increasingly by nitty gritty efforts to implement specific projects and stretch limited funds to make progress on concrete initiatives. Equally important, the chairmanship of the Barents Council rotated for the first time at the September 1994 meeting, moving from Norway, which had served until then as the founding chair, to Finland for a one-year term. The importance of this occurrence as a sign that the Barents Region was taking on a life of its own rather than remaining little more than a Norwegian project is undeniable. As in the case of the AEPS, however, there is an element of arbitrariness in designating any specific point in the development of the BEAR as the moment of transition from operationalization to routine operation. The chairmanship of the Regional Council did not rotate for the first time until the January 1995 meeting, when Sweden assumed the chair for a two-year term. Even then, there were unresolved issues regarding the fate of the Kirkenes Secretariat in contrast to a small secretariat set up by the Swedes in Lulea to provide support for the Swedish chair of the Regional Council.9 Moreover, the adoption of the Barents Programme raised a host of new questions about funding and on-the-ground implementation. Still, there is no denying that the joint meeting of the two councils in September 1994 marked an important turning point in the life of the BEAR. 7. See, for example, Hoist, "The Barents Region." 8. The Barents Programme 1994, a document prepared by the Regional Council and printed by fagtrykk alta as in Norway. 9. See Barents Dialog: News from Barentssekretariatet, no. 1, January 1995. This is an English-language newsletter prepared by the Kirkenes Secretariat starting in 1995.

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International Operationalization An examination of the organization of the AEPS at the international level (see Figure 5.1) yields two immediate observations: (1) the basic structure of the AEPS is quite simple; and (2) the influence on the AEPS of the model provided by the European Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP) Regime is clearly visible.10 The primary decisionmaking body of the AEPS, the biennial ministerial meeting, has no permanent staff or secretariat of its own.11 In this regard, the system resembles the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings (ATCMs) convened every second year under the terms of the Antarctic Treaty of 1959. The chairmanship of the ministerial meetings moves from one member to another after each ministerial, and the new chair is responsible for handling the preparations and providing the staffing for the session to follow. Nor is there any provision for ongoing machinery to backstop the activities of the Senior Arctic Affairs Officials (SAAOs). Meetings of this group require little preparation, and any staffing needed is supplied by the host country on a case-by-case basis. Under the circumstances, the work of operationalizing the AEPS at the international level has fallen primarily on the task forces and working groups together with their secretariats and the programmatic activities they have set in motion. Since AMAP became the focus of attention during the stage of Operationalization, the following account concentrates on this element of the AEPS. For comparison, a few notes on the other elements are included following the discussion of AMAP. A glance at the organizational chart for AMAP (see Figure 5.2) indicates that this component of the AEPS has acquired a more complex character than the overarching structure of the AEPS itself. The term AMAP refers to the whole complex comprising the Task Force, a board, a secretariat, and a variety of ad hoc working groups. At this juncture, Norway supplies the AMAP Secretariat, which it has endowed with international legal personality.12 The other costs of carrying out AMAP's mandate are borne by AEPS member countries. But there are no fixed assessments, and the existence of sizable asymmetries among the members

10. For a general analysis of the development and impact of LRTAP, see Levy, "European Acid Rain," 75-132. 11. The operation of the Arctic Council, established formally through the signing of a ministerial declaration in September 1996, will have far-reaching consequences for the AEPS. Among other things, the AEPS working groups will be folded into the overarching program of the council. 12. The issue of legal personality has important implications for the status of secretariat employees both within the host country and in the international community more broadly. For their part, neither the CAFF Secretariat nor the Kirkenes Secretariat are endowed with international legal personality.

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Figure 5.1 Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) organizational chart

with regard to contributions has become a sore point.13 Any effort to appraise the operationalization of AMAP must take account of several distinct issues, which could be thought of as the four m's: (1) mandate, (2) machinery, (3) methods, and (4) money. 13. In particular, the inadequacy of American contributions to AMAP's efforts has caused considerable unhappiness among those who have contributed.

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Figure 5.2 Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) organizational model

Planning for the Operationalization of AMAP goes back at least to the November 1990 experts meeting in Oslo, an event that also played a major role in establishing the conceptual link between AMAP and EMEP—the monitoring and assessment system that constitutes an essential component of the LRTAP Regime.14 The June 1991 Rovaniemi Declaration carried this line of thinking a step forward, calling on AMAP "to monitor the levels of, and assess the effects of, anthropogenic pollutants in all components of the Arctic environment," including the atmosphere, terrestrial, marine and freshwater ecosystems, and human health. As the record of the December 1991 AMATF meeting makes clear, however, a number of issues relating to the formulation of AMAP's mandate required further attention. To begin with, the Task Force considered the establishment of priorities among the environmental problems identified in the AEPS and agreed after considerable discussion to assign priority 14. See Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP)—Minutes from the Expert Meeting in Oslo, 12-16 November 1990, Oslo, Norway: State Pollution Control Authority.

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to radionuclides, persistent organic compounds, and heavy metals. A striking feature of this set of priorities is the absence from the list of acidification—the problem that operated as an important stimulus to the original Finnish Initiative launched in 1988-89. There was as well an extended discussion of a European proposal to add climate change and an American proposal to add Arctic haze to the list of AMAP priorities.15 But in the end, the list of three remained unchanged. An equally important debate arose over the question of whether AMAP should concentrate on specific pollutants (radionuclides, heavy metals, and so forth) or on major media (atmosphere, marine environment, terrestrial environment, and so on) in which pollutants accumulate. The outcome in this case involved the development of a matrix, with pollutants on one axis, media on the other, and individual cells (e.g., heavy metals in the marine environment, radionuclides in the atmosphere) becoming centers of attention. In this connection, individual members agreed to take the lead in dealing with the various media. Canada, for example, chose the atmosphere, and Finland chose terrestrial ecosystems. Finally, the Task Force confirmed the idea that AMAP should take the production of a comprehensive "State of the Arctic Environment Report" as its priority project and that this report should be prepared for presentation to a ministerial meeting by 1996.16 An interesting story concerns the creation of the AMAP Secretariat—a small but critically important unit, given the role the AMAP is expected to play. The initial proposal to get this secretariat up and running by the end of 1991 ran into a number of snags that are familiar to those responsible for operationalizing regimes at the international level. Although a job description for the position of executive secretary was prepared in the fall, Reierson was not actually appointed until April 1992 and began work in August 1992, well over a year after the signing of the Rovaniemi Declaration. Additional problems arose in working out the details of the secretariat's legal status and in recruiting the members of a small staff. Although Norway stood by its offer to cover the core costs of the secretariat and to provide office space, a decision was taken to grant the AMAP Secretariat the status of an international entity and to give diplomatic status to its staff. Whatever its attractions in principle, this turned out to be easier said than done, partly because Norway had a hard time identifying 15. See document entitled "Terms of Reference, Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Strategy," 10 November 1991 (on file with author). 16. As it turned out, this report was not finished in time for the third ministerial meeting held in Inuvik, Canada, during March 1996. AMAP tabled the report at the fourth ministerial held in Alta, Norway, during June 1997.

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relevant models to apply to this case and partly because of the absence of a legally binding agreement setting forth the terms of the AMAP. Under the circumstances, the AMAP Secretariat did not become fully operational as an international entity until the second half of 1993, a fact that reflects the complications that arise in operationalizing even a simple arrangement like the AMAP. It soon became apparent that the AMAP, much like the EMEP before it, would have to work hard to solve serious methodological problems in fulfilling its mandate.17 Because there was no prospect of establishing a network of new facilities to monitor and assess anthropogenic pollutants in the Arctic, the AMAP's monitoring efforts have had to rely on secondhand data—data collected by other organizations largely for other purposes. This arrangement presents at least three significant problems: reliability, coverage, and comparability. The AMAP has little capacity to check on the quality of the data it receives from various sources. It must accept data from existing field stations and laboratories, regardless of whether these facilities are sited to provide adequate coverage of the whole Arctic. Above all, the AMAP must struggle with the problem of harmonizing data sets collected for different purposes, using unrelated protocols and different instrumentation. As those familiar with the experience of the EMEP know well, the resultant methodological problems are daunting, even though it would be wrong to regard them as altogether crippling. Beyond this, there are a number of analytic issues related to the assessment side of the AMAP's mandate. Whereas monitoring is fundamentally a matter of data collection, assessment involves the development of models and other interpretive procedures to answer questions about the extent to which pollutants entering the Arctic are anthropogenic in origin, the sources of these pollutants, and the cumulative impacts of a number of separate pollutants affecting key Arctic ecosystems at the same time.18 These methodological problems have not paralyzed the AMAP, but, taken together, they raise serious questions about the capacity of the AMAP to produce meaningful results.19 It will come as no surprise that the presence 17. For an extended assessment of the EMEP experience, see J. C. di Primo, "Monitoring and Verifying Compliance in Environmental Agreements: The Case of Acid Rain in Europe," International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, July 1995. 18. For a general discussion of these issues, see Gordon H. Orians, "Thought for the Morrow: Cumulative Threats to the Environment," Environment 37 (September 1995): 6-14 and 33-36. 19. As one means of alleviating these problems, the AMAP turned to the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) in 1993 and asked that body to arrange for a scientific audit of the program's data collection and analysis efforts.

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of these problems provides considerable ammunition for those desiring to criticize the performance of the AEPS. Inevitably, the problem of money also looms large in any account of the AMAP's capacity to fulfill its mandate. Norway played a central role in designing the AMAP and has made a continuing commitment to it by funding the Oslo-based secretariat. But this does not begin to cover the larger costs of operating the AMAP on the scale required to monitor and assess the environment of the Arctic on a comprehensive basis. The resultant problems are alleviated to some extent by the willingness of individual members to accept assignments as lead countries for specific aspects of the AMAP's task—Denmark is lead country for matters of human health, for example, and the United States is lead country for modeling and remote sensing. Yet the need for operating funds is unavoidable. In this connection, the performance of individual members has been erratic. Not surprisingly, Norway has been the principal contributor; Canada and Denmark have also made significant contributions. Needless to say, Russia has been in no position to contribute to the general costs of operating the AMAP in the years following the signing of the Rovaniemi Declaration. More notable has been the lack of significant contributions coming from Finland, Sweden, and especially the United States. A major part of the problem in this connection certainly lies in the absence of binding commitments. The AEPS monitoring and assessment program lacks anything comparable to the 1984 EMEP Protocol in the case of the European transboundary air pollution regime. In part, it is attributable to differences among member countries with regard to overall economic performance and the status of their public sector deficits. But whatever the cause, the problem of finding funds to underwrite the efforts of the AMAP places sharp limits on what it is reasonable to expect this body to accomplish. By comparison, efforts to operationalize the other elements of the AEPS Action Plan at the international level were relatively modest during the first two to three years in the life of this regime. As the preceding section indicates, CAFF began to develop a life of its own at a relatively early stage. Yet the CAFF agenda was dominated during the operationalization stage by Canadian and Norwegian interests in building up a network of protected natural areas and by Canadian concerns about the role of indigenous peoples in efforts to protect the Arctic environment; the CAFF Secretariat established in Ottawa by the Canadians emerged as a more modest and ad hoc arrangement than the AMAP Secretariat in Oslo. Accordingly, CAFF devoted itself during this stage to assembling baseline data and drawing up plans for the development of an expanded network of protected areas in the Circumpolar North.

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As for FAME and EPPR, their Operationalization at the international level lagged even farther behind.20 The explanation for these differences is not hard to find. The AMAP had the advantage both of being able to draw on the EMEP experience and of being an object of considerable attention during the negotiation stage of the formation of the AEPS. For its part, PAME deals with matters that are politically sensitive, given the continued use of Arctic waters by American and Russian nuclear-powered submarines, ongoing controversies over the harvesting of marine mammals, and the presence of unresolved jurisdictional issues in several parts of the Arctic. In the case of EPPR, a number of participants questioned the need for an Arctic-specific arrangement to deal with emergencies; others preferred an approach to such matters featuring an interlocking system of bilateral agreements, in contrast to an Arctic-wide arrangement. None of this meant that PAME and EPPR would be unable to acquire more substance with the passage of time; there is evidence that they began to emerge as significant elements of the AEPS Action Plan following the Nuuk ministerial. Yet there is no denying that these components of the AEPS Action Plan were relatively quiescent during the stage of the process of regime formation which began with the signing of the Rovaniemi Declaration and extended to the convening of the second AEPS ministerial in September 1993. The organization of the BEAR at the international level (see Figure 5.3) is complex by comparison with the AEPS. There are a number of reasons for this difference. The BEAR covers a broad spectrum of functional concerns, as opposed to the more restricted focus of the AEPS on environmental protection. The BEAR features a dual system in which subnational units of government as well as national governments must agree on a division of labor and work together in a coordinated fashion. This arrangement operates in an environment in which other organizations, like the Nordic Council of Ministers, are active and cannot be ignored. What is more, a major goal of the BEAR is to create a region in a geographical area whose component parts do not constitute a natural or obvious affinity group.21 One way to accomplish this goal is to create new machinery and then to endow this machinery with the authority to take the initiative in the development of projects and programs. Under the circumstances, it will come as no surprise that one major cluster of issues involved in operationalizing the BEAR at the international level centered on fitting the various pieces of this regime together. At the 20. J. Keller, "Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment (PAME)" and "The Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response Working Group," WWF Arctic Bulletin, no. 3.94: 4-5. 21. Stokke and Tunander, eds., The Barents Region, especially part 2.

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Figure 5.3 Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR) organization chart

outset, there was a need to spell out both a division of labor and a procedure to ensure coordination between the Barents Council and the Regional Council. What emerged, in this connection, is an arrangement under which the Regional Council took the lead in establishing functional committees and in framing projects to be included in the Barents Programme, whereas the Barents Council assumed primary responsibility for dealing with issues of funding and the role of the BEAR in the evolving Europe of Regions. The process of working out this division of labor during the period of operationalization was undoubtedly facilitated by Stoltenberg's emphasis on the importance of regional initiatives, the positive relationship that existed between Stoltenberg and Flotten, and the willingness of the national government of Norway to pump money into the BEAR as a means of ensuring the success of this Norwegian Initiative. But there is no guarantee that the resulting arrangement will remain stable over time. Subnational units of government in Finland and Sweden have less experience

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with the sorts of initiatives required to operate the Regional Council than their Norwegian counterparts. As each council chair rotates, there is no assurance that the strength of the Stoltenberg-Flotten relationship in this connection can be sustained. Issues relating to funding projects included in the Barents Programme could well become bones of contention—a concern heightened by the fact that Norway voted against membership in the EU in the fall of 1994, whereas Finland and Sweden voted affirmatively and became EU members as of 1 January 1995. The creation of secretariats to provide support for the Barents Council and especially for the Regional Council illustrates some of the problems that can arise in this setting. Unlike the AMAP Secretariat, the BEAR secretariats have not been set up as permanent arrangements possessing international legal personalities of their own. Logically, this suggests that it is reasonable to expect these secretariats to rotate along with the chairmanship of each of the councils. This was certainly the expectation of Sweden when it assumed the chair of the Regional Council at the beginning of 1995 and established a small secretariat in Lulea to provide administrative support for Gunnar Brodin, the governor of Norrboten, who succeeded Erling Flotten as that council's chair. But the Kirkenes Secretariat, still under the direction of Oddrunn Pettersen, has shown no indication of a willingness to retire from the field as a consequence of this transition. In fact, Pettersen has worked hard to add permanent positions to the staff of the Kirkenes Secretariat.22 This is not to suggest that an appropriate division of labor cannot be found. But it is clear both that the emergence of this issue was not foreseen at the time of the creation of the BEAR and that some way of resolving this problem of multiple secretariats will have to be found during the near future. Unlike the AEPS, which came into existence in a kind of circumarctic institutional vacuum, the BEAR entered a field already occupied by other institutions. Undoubtedly, the most significant of these is the Nordic Council of Ministers, along with the council's North Calotte Committee and its program of Adjacent Areas Activities—both because this council is a source of funding for projects of interest to the BEAR and because the council's Adjacent Areas Activities were seen by some (especially in Finland) at the time as constituting a political alternative to the Barents Initiative.23 Under the circumstances, building bridges between the BEAR and the Nordic Council of Ministers became a central concern in the 22. Barents Dialog. 23. For a description of the council's work in this area, see Nordic Council of Ministers International Unit, "Nordic Council of Ministers Working Programme for the Adjacent Areas" (on file with author).

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effort to operationalize the BEAR in the period following the Kirkenes Declaration.24 So far, this effort has taken place largely at the level of the Regional Council. Thus, the Nordic Council of Ministers now has a permanent representative on the staff of the Kirkenes Secretariat, and that council's working programme for the Adjacent Areas is a source of funds for some projects included in the Barents Programme. So long as Norway held the chair of both BEAR councils, this arrangement remained stable. But it will be interesting to see how the rotation of the chairmanship of the two BEAR councils affects the relationship between the BEAR and the Nordic Council of Ministers in what is now known as the Great Calotte, in contrast to the North Calotte.25 A second cluster of issues central to the operationalization of the BEAR encompasses the effort that culminated in the adoption of the Barents Programme in September 1994. An outgrowth of the work of ten committees operating largely under the auspices of the Regional Council, the Barents Programme looks toward the year 2000 and includes eighty-four distinct projects grouped under the headings of culture, secondary education and student exchange, transmission of knowledge, indigenous peoples, agriculture and reindeer husbandry, industry and economics, scientific and technological research and development, the environment, health, and communications. Individual projects are classified as small, medium, or large depending on their scope and duration, and the councils decided to begin with "smaller projects which can be started quickly in order to solve simple tasks and fill specific needs."26 In many ways, the development of a comprehensive program for the whole region less than two years after the signing of the Kirkenes Declaration constitutes an impressive achievement in the effort to operationalize the Barents Regime. Yet this result was not achieved without real drawbacks. For example, the Barents Programme shows clear signs of its origins as a compilation of proposals emanating from many sources with little effort to provide central guidance. The programme lacks both guiding principles that add up to a vision of the region as a whole and operational procedures that could serve as a basis for differentiating between essential projects and marginal projects and for setting priorities in allocating limited funds. 24. See Nordic Council, Arctic Challenges: Report from the Nordic Council's Parliamentary Conference in Reykjavik 16-17 August 1993. 25. Whereas the North Calotte refers to northern Fennoscandia, the Great Calotte includes a sizable portion of northwestern Russia. Stoltenberg began referring publicly to the Great Calotte in the fall of 1992 as means of showing continuity between the North Calotte and the proposed Barents Euro-Arctic Region. 26. The Barents Programme, 13.

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Funding to carry out BEAR projects has been provided by individual regime members on a case-by-case basis. Plans to implement the Barents Programme during 1995, for example, called for thirty separate projects budgeted at a level of NOK 55 million. Of this total, Norway committed NOK 26 million, to be channeled through its Programme of Action for Eastern Europe; Finland and Sweden each made considerably smaller commitments. At this juncture, Russia had little capacity to fund specific projects, except for the possibility of providing certain in-kind contributions. On the contrary, Russia looked to the BEAR increasingly as a means of obtaining financial assistance—needed to energize the economic reconstruction of northwestern Russia—from the Scandinavians and, through them, from the EU. For their part, the three Nordic states developed different preferences in evaluating specific projects, with Finland showing a particular interest in projects pertaining to forests and forest products, Norway taking a special interest in projects involving fishing, and Sweden expressing interest in mining projects. During the stage of operationalizing the BEAR, funds administered by the Norwegian Foreign Ministry were the primary source of resources for projects. It is worth noting, however, that others began to contribute following the September 1994 ministerial; the membership of Finland and Sweden in the EU has now opened up the prospect of the Barents Region becoming eligible for various forms of EU funding. Overall, funds available for BEAR projects were quite limited during the stage of Operationalization, and the funding picture remains somewhat cloudy today. In the end, there will be no alternative to establishing a common budget with an agreed formula governing the contributions of individual regime members if the BEAR is to become an influential mechanism for promoting cooperation in Europe's northernmost region. Those responsible for operating the BEAR are fully aware of this issue and are attempting to deal with it. Yet a third cluster of issues that arose in conjunction with the Operationalization of the BEAR centered on links between this new arrangement and a variety of other bodies, including the Nordic Environmental Finance Corporation (NEFCO), the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and the EU itself. The fundamental issue has centered on the role of the BEAR as an operational mechanism for the reconstruction of Russia and its reintegration into Europe and on the contributions of the other bodies as sources of funds to help underwrite these efforts. With the exception of the NEFCO, these links have remained stronger on paper than they are in practice. Needless to say, Norway's decision during the fall of 1994 to remain outside the European Union (EU) has complicated the relationship between the BEAR and

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the EU. Even so, EU programs aimed at structural adjustment through the allocation of Interreg Programme funds to poorer members or potential members and special assistance to Russia through the Technical Assistance to the Commonwealth of Independent States (TACIS) program have become attractive as potential sources of support for BEAR projects, especially now that Finland and Sweden have become members of the EU.27 There are as well some significant questions about the linkages between the AEPS, a functionally restricted but geographically broad regime, and the BEAR, a functionally broader but geographically more limited arrangement.28 In some countries (e.g., Finland), there is evidence that the two initiatives have begun to reinforce each other, providing an incentive to allocate resources to Arctic issues that neither initiative alone could command.29 On the other hand, there are good reasons to believe that the two regimes will evolve in ways that generate contradictions as well as commonalities. Whereas the AEPS places primary emphasis on environmental protection and aims to mitigate the impact of anthropogenic pollutants on Arctic ecosystems, a major premise of the BEAR is the need to encourage economic growth in the North, especially in northwestern Russia. Combining these objectives could lead to an enlightened program emphasizing sustainable development under the conditions prevailing in high latitudes. But there were few signs during the operationalization stage of key players endeavoring to think about these issues creatively, and it seems at least as likely that the success of the BEAR will prove to be another source of problems from the perspective of those endeavoring to fulfill during the foreseeable future the mandate embedded in the AEPS Action Plan. Domestic Operationalization Although some action at the international level is essential to operationalize most regimes, it is important to realize that much of the action regarding the operationalization of these arrangements takes place within individual members—in other words, at the domestic level. Member states are invariably responsible for fulfilling their end of programmatic bargains and, in the final analysis, for adjusting their own behavior and redirecting 27. For a cautious assessment of the implications of Finnish and Swedish membership in the EU for the development of the BEAR, see Adele Airoldi, "The Arctic Is 'In,'" Harvard Center for International Affairs, unpublished paper, 1995 (on file with author). 28. For a general account of institutional linkages, see Oran R. Young, "Institutional Linkages in International Society: Polar Perspectives," Global Governance 2 (1996): 1-23. 29. An interesting example of complementarity arose when NEFCO contracted with AMAP to organize a study of environmental hot spots in northwestern Russia. AMAP arranged in turn for the Lapland Environmental Center to do the actual work.

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the behavior of actors subject to their jurisdiction in order to fulfill commitments undertaken under the terms of international agreements. The resultant process of domestic Operationalization is difficult to characterize in general terms because there are inevitably marked variations among regime members with regard to their interests, motives for joining regimes, social institutions, political cultures, and material circumstances. Even so, there are some generic issues relating to domestic Operationalization that warrant consideration. This section addresses these generic issues, starting with some broad themes and proceeding to an account of four types of political dynamics that are common to processes of domestic Operationalization. The following section picks up on a number of these issues and comments on the experiences of individual regime members with regard to the domestic Operationalization of the AEPS and the BEAR. The degree of importance national policymakers attach to a regime makes a difference in terms of domestic Operationalization. The cases considered in this study offer fertile ground for examining this proposition, since the BEAR was construed from the outset as a matter of high politics involving senior officials in all members states, whereas the AEPS was widely seen as a matter of low politics to be relegated to the activities of line agencies far removed from key centers of policymaking.30 When senior officials make it clear that an issue is a matter of importance to them, things happen at the domestic level. Thus, both Stoltenberg and Hoist in the role of Norwegian foreign minister treated the BEAR as a matter of first priority.31 As a result, they assigned staff within the Foreign Ministry to work on operationalizing the BEAR, took the lead in organizing a number of meetings to follow up on the commitments made at Kirkenes in January 1993, and funded the activities of the Regional Council that resulted in the Barents Programme in September 1994. Similarly, Kozyrev as Russia's foreign minister (and after December 1993 as a member of the State Duma from Murmansk) attached sufficient priority to the BEAR to establish and chair a new interagency commission—the Interagency Commission on the Barents Region—expressly for the purpose of transforming the Kirkenes Declaration into a politically meaningful program within Russia. By contrast, national governments often farmed out efforts to operationalize the AEPS to low-level agencies, such as the State Pollution Control 30. Compare the accounts in Sverre Jervell, "A Report from Europe's Northern Periphery," in Kukk, Jervell, and Joenniemi, eds., The Baltic Sea Area, 11-25; and Oran R. Young, "The Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy: Looking Backward, Looking Forward," paper presented at the 1995 Calotte Academy, 21 May, 1995, Inari, Finland. 31. Hoist, "The Barents Region."

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Authority in Norway, the All-Russian Institute for Nature Protection in Russia, and the Canadian Wildlife Service. In some countries, like the United States, individual agencies even reacted to assignments under the AEPS by seeking to hand them off to one another; the behavior of the EPA is particularly striking in this regard. Needless to say, the attention of high-level policymakers offers no guarantee that efforts to operationalize international commitments within domestic arenas will prove particularly effective; the consequences of politicization are too complex for that. What is more, there are cases in which comparatively low-level agencies operating beyond the limelight of high politics succeed in carrying out international commitments with considerable success.32 In general, however, it is fair to say that the amount of time, energy, and resources devoted to operationalizing international agreements at the domestic level will rise as a function of the importance attached to these issues in domestic political arenas. This discussion suggests as well some observations about the relationship between the form international agreements take (that is, hard law versus soft law) and the effort expended on operationalizing them at the domestic level. Much has been made of this distinction in accounts of the American political system, where the separation of powers and the presence of a strong legal culture work against efforts to operationalize agreements that have not been ratified by the Senate and incorporated into domestic law through the passage of implementing legislation. But in many other political systems, where the separation between the executive and legislative branches of government is less pronounced, this line of reasoning is less persuasive. In such cases, the key issue is likely to be the level of political importance attached to an agreement by national policymakers. Given the priority Stoltenberg and his colleagues accorded the BEAR, for example, there was no doubt that the government of Norway would take vigorous steps to operationalize the BEAR at home. On the other hand, the lack of enthusiasm about Arctic cooperation in the United States during this period makes it doubtful that formal ratification of an Arctic environmental protection agreement by the Senate would have had a pronounced effect in galvanizing public agencies to take vigorous action in this realm. With some exceptions, therefore, it seems accurate to conclude that the political importance attached to international agreements is more important than the form the agreements take in determining the amount of political capital and material resources members will expend on operationalizing their provisions in domestic arenas. 32. On the case of polar bears, see Oystein Wiig, Erik W. Born, and Gerald W Garner, eds., Polar Bears: Proceedings of the Eleventh Working Group Meeting of the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group, IUCN: Gland, Switzerland, 1995.

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The extent to which a regime is programmatic rather than regulatory in character also has important implications for domestic Operationalization. Because systems of rules or behavioral prescriptions constitute the central feature of regulatory arrangements, those responsible for administering them must concentrate on matters of compliance, including procedures for monitoring the behavior of subjects, deterring prospective violators, and responding to the infractions of those who nevertheless violate the rules.33 By contrast, programmatic regimes, like the AEPS and the BEAR, direct the attention of administrators toward initiating projects under their own auspices and building alliances with actors in the private sector in support of initiatives intended to promote common goals. In the case of the AEPS, for example, this means assembling and analyzing the data required to complete the State of the Arctic Environment Report and participating actively in planning processes intended to lead to an expansion of the system of protected natural areas throughout the Arctic region. With regard to the BEAR, it means providing financial incentives for companies interested in moving into the Barents Region and direct funding for the improvements in infrastructure needed to make the region attractive to corporate investors. Whereas those in charge of regulatory regimes are apt to spend their time tracking down evidence regarding possible violations, resolving disputes relating to compliance, and devising appropriate sanctions, those responsible for the success of programmatic regimes are more likely to find themselves managing substantive projects, developing financial incentives for corporate initiatives, or brokering deals involving joint ventures between investors in one or more member countries (for example, Finland or Norway) and those who control investment opportunities in other member countries (for instance, Russia).34 The functional scope of a regime is another factor that has important implications for domestic Operationalization. In this connection, the contrast between the AEPS, which is essentially an environmental regime, and the BEAR, which is a multifunctional arrangement, is instructive. It is sometimes possible for a single ministry or department to handle the domestic Operationalization of regimes—like the AEPS—that deal with one (albeit broad) issue area.35 The experience of the United States, in which 33. Mitchell, Intentional Oil Pollution at Sea; and Chayes and Chayes, The New Sovereignty. 34. For a relevant case study that emphasizes the complexities of programmatic initiatives, see Vaahtoranta, "Environmental Protection in Finnish-Soviet Relations." 35. Ministries or departments typically encompass a number of line agencies whose interests may diverge substantially despite the fact that they belong to the same parent organization.

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the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Coast Guard all play roles of some importance regarding the AEPS, makes it clear that fragmentation is possible, even in cases where a regime deals with a single issue area. But in Norway, Russia, and Sweden, environment ministries have assumed primary responsibility for fulfilling commitments made under the terms of the AEPS. On the other hand, in the case of the BEAR, where a single regime deals with health, science, transportation, cultural affairs, economic development, and environmental protection, there is no escaping both the need to involve a number of ministries or departments and the resultant problems of making arrangements for interdepartmental coordination. It is no accident, for example, that the Russian government set up a specialized Interagency Commission on the Barents Region for the sole purpose of coordinating activities relating to the BEAR. None of this means that functionally broad regimes will inevitably prove less successful than regimes that are narrower in terms of functional scope. But it does ensure that efforts to operationalize broad arrangements will encounter a level of interagency politics that is largely absent in the case of narrower regimes that are administered for the most part by a single ministry or department. The structures of intergovernmental relations prevailing within individual member countries can play a role as well when it comes to operationalizing international regimes at the domestic level.36 Perhaps the most important concern in this connection involves the extent to which the political systems of member countries are centralized or decentralized. In countries like Canada, where there is a long history of decentralization in general terms coupled with a substantial devolution of authority to the northern territories over the last twenty years, there is no prospect of fulfilling programmatic commitments under the AEPS without involving subnational units of government at every stage in the process. In countries like Finland, by contrast, where authority is highly concentrated in the central government, the concerns of subnational units of government may not be particularly important with regard to operationalization. Three related phenomena can and often do complicate efforts to operationalize regimes at the domestic level. In countries like Norway where there is a history of competition between representatives of central and county government officials regarding regional issues, there is always a risk that operationalizing an arrangement like the BEAR will become yet another arena for parties engaged in an ongoing competition. When struc36. For a general account, see Hocking, Localizing Foreign Policy.

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tures of intergovernmental relations are themselves in a state of flux—as they are in Russia today—domestic Operationalization may fall victim to the more general turmoil surrounding intergovernmental relations. In the Russia Federation, real variations in relations between Moscow and Archangel, Moscow and Murmansk, and Moscow and Petrozavodsk make it even more hazardous to project the course of efforts to operationalize an arrangement like the BEAR.37 Moreover, there are the complications arising when individual regime members differ markedly with one another regarding the handling of intergovernmental relations. How are individual members of a regime to proceed, for instance, when the allocation of tasks between the central government and various subnational units of government that is natural for them does not match the parallel allocation of tasks devised by governments in other regime members? Finally, there is no escaping the fact that broader, contextual developments, unrelated to the issue of domestic Operationalization in origin, can have dramatic consequences for the efforts of governments to follow through on commitments made in international agreements. Perhaps the most striking example with regard to the AEPS and the BEAR involves the economic decline of Russia in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This decline, which has hit the Russian North with particular force, has made it impossible for the government of Russia to invest significant resources in the programmatic activities called for under the terms of the AEPS and, especially, the BEAR.38 In fact, Russia has turned increasingly to the regional ties developed in connection with the BEAR as a possible basis for obtaining financial support for the rebuilding of northwestern Russia. Although the Russian case is undoubtedly the most spectacular in this connection, it is hardly the only example of contextual factors affecting the Operationalization of the AEPS and the BEAR in individual member countries. The economic depression that struck Finland in the early 1990s, for example, undoubtedly played a role in transforming Finland from the champion of the AEPS during the stage of agenda formation into a relative laggard during the Operationalization stage. Similarly, persistent political pressure to do something about the federal budget deficit in the United States made it difficult for agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to 37. See, for example, Oleg A. Andreev and Mats-Olov Olsson, "Regional Self-Government in Russia—The Situation in the County of Murmansk," Working Paper No. 3, Centre for Regional Science, Umea University, 1995. 38. For a controversial assessment of this dilemma, see V M. Kotlyakov and G. A. Agranat, "Global Changes and Northern Regions," paper presented at the Conference on Global Changes and Geography, Moscow, 15-18 August 1995.

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move vigorously to fulfill commitments undertaken in conjunction with the AEPS. Because the causal mechanisms associated with these contextual forces have little if anything to do with operationalization of the regimes in question, it is hard to foresee how they will affect the transition from paper to practice in specific cases. But this does nothing to diminish the impact these mechanisms can have on operationalization. Although there is always an element of arbitrariness in establishing boundaries, it is possible to identify differences among four types of political dynamics at work in the domestic operationalization process. Taken together, these dynamics account for the distinctive character of the operationalization stage and set this stage of regime formation apart from the stages of agenda formation and negotiation. The ensuing discussion comments on these dynamics with particular reference to the AEPS and the BEAR under the following headings: administrative politics, bureaucratic politics, budgetary politics, and advocacy politics. Administrative Politics The object of administrative politics is the allocation of roles among government agencies assuming responsibility for ongoing projects.39 With regard to programmatic regimes, like the AEPS and the BEAR, this means assigning responsibility for the fulfillment of specific commitments to agencies whose interests and operating procedures are apt to differ markedly. At the national level, it is helpful to differentiate at least three cases in this connection. Sometimes a single agency or ministry dominates an issue area and, in effect, calls the shots with regard to domestic operationalization. The central role of the Norwegian Foreign Ministry in getting the BEAR up and running in the period following the Kirkenes Declaration exemplifies this case. In other cases, there is a division of labor between the Foreign Ministry, which is responsible for explaining and justifying national efforts to fulfill commitments in interactions with other regime members, and another ministry (for instance, the Environment Ministry) that has the capacity to carry out the programmatic activities required to meet international commitments. The relationships emerging between the foreign and environment ministries of Finland and Norway in connection with the AEPS Action Plan fit this description. In still other cases, a number of line agencies emerge as players in the process of operationalization. Even in the comparatively simple case of the AEPS, for example, three departments and one 39. For a case study that discusses these issues, see Marc K. Landy, Marc J. Roberts, and Stephen R. Thomas, The Environmental Protection Agency: Asking the Wrong Questions from Nixon to Clinton, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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major agency of the federal government in the United States got involved in this process.40 With respect to regimes that are functionally broader, like the BEAR, it is reasonable to expect that an even wider range of line agencies will become involved. In such cases, it generally becomes important to create some mechanism to facilitate interagency coordination in matters relating to domestic operationalization. Examples relevant to the AEPS and the BEAR include the Polar Commission of Finland, the Interagency Commission on the Barents Region in Russia, and the Interagency Arctic Policy Group in the United States. Such mechanisms are notoriously difficult to operate successfully, both because participating agencies have divergent and sometimes conflicting interests and because agencies develop distinctive decision cultures that impede interagency communication. But the need for such coordination is inescapable when the contributions of a number of agencies are needed to fulfill common goals. Beyond this, there are often issues of intergovernmental relations to be addressed in connection with the operationalization of regimes at the domestic level. In many countries, intergovernmental relations constitute a turbulent and contentious political domain for reasons having nothing to do with the regulatory or programmatic concerns of specific regimes. Under the circumstances, it is easy for the process of operationalization to get caught up in the politics of intergovernmental relations. The case of the Russian Federation, where the issue of decentralization is at the top of the political agenda, is an extreme example at the present time.41 Interestingly, central agencies located in Moscow worked hard to maintain control over the AEPS, whereas regional governments located in Archangel, Murmansk, and Petrozavodsk seized on the BEAR as a device for promoting their own interests in the larger drama of intergovernmental relations in Russia. Yet Russia is not the only member of the AEPS and the BEAR in which such matters of administrative politics have emerged. In Canada, for instance, the concomitant process of devolving authority to northern territories and creating new political entities—such as Nunavut—in the North raised major questions about the operationalization of the AEPS.42 In Norway, by contrast, the national government used the BEAR as a mechanism for strengthening the role of the county governments in Nordland, Troms, 40. On the structure of decisionmaking regarding Arctic issues in the United States, see Osherenko and Young, Age of the Arctic, chap. 8. 41. See Jan Ake Dellenbrant and Oleg Andreev, "Russian Politics in Transition: Political Parties and Organizations in Russia and the Murmansk Region," Scandinavian Political Studies 17 (1994): 109-42. 42. See, for example, Mark O. Dickerson, Whose North? Political Change, Political Development, and Self-Government in the Northwest Territories, Vancouver: UBC Press, 1992.

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and Finnmark. Yet financial resources remain under the control of the center, so that it is still necessary to engage in intensive negotiations over funding when it comes to carrying out projects such as those included in the Barents Programme adopted in September 1994. Bureaucratic Politics Once roles are allocated, agencies must turn to the substantive task of developing projects to fulfill the requirements of programmatic regimes like the AEPS and the BEAR. Depending on their circumstances, individual agencies may see their new roles as burdens to be shunted aside or minimalized or as targets of opportunity to be pursued with vigor. Agencies are likely to be unenthusiastic about the roles assigned to them when such roles do not mesh well with their prior commitments or standard practices; the effort these roles require is seen as competing with other higher priority roles, or the prospects of receiving additional material resources to carry out the new assignments are unfavorable.43 The case of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in connection with the operationalization of AMAP is a case in point. Senior officials within the EPA did not regard the Arctic as a priority area relative to the continental United States. The fact that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had agreed to American participation in the AEPS on the explicit condition that participation would not require new funding undoubtedly constituted a deterrent to EPA action relating to AMAP Moreover, EPA did not experience strong pressure from either the Executive Office of the President or the State Department to take its AMAP responsibilities seriously. Under the circumstances, the absence of a legislative mandate and the fact that few members of Congress, other than the three members of the Alaska delegation, had any real interest in Arctic issues only served to reinforce the EPA's inclination to minimize its efforts to respond to the needs of the AMAP. Yet this is by no means the whole story with regard to the role of bureaucratic politics in the operationalization of regimes at the domestic level. Individual agencies can and often do exploit assignments relating to commitments undertaken under the provisions of international regimes to promote their own interests in interactions with other agencies or with those who make decisions about funding. The comparatively new Ministry of the Environment (Minpriroda) in Russia, for example, seized on its responsibilities under the AMAP and CAFF to expand its role relative to the older State Committee on Hydrometeorolgy (Hydromet). The Norwegian State 43. Allison, Essence of Decision; and Morton H. Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1974.

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Pollution Control Authority, an entity associated with the Environment Ministry, has played an important role in establishing and sheltering the AMAP Secretariat, claiming in the process a greater share of the action regarding Arctic issues in Norway.44 Regional governments in the northern counties of Finland, Norway, and Sweden have cited their new responsibilities under the BEAR as a justification for asserting a more independent role in their dealings with the national governments of these countries. Once established, the Barents Secretariat under the leadership of Oddrunn Pettersen has clung tenaciously to its role as a regional administrative apparatus for the BEAR in order to justify its continuing claims on Norwegian resources. The nature of these interactions as well as the outcomes they yield will obviously vary from case to case. But the point to remember in this context is that efforts to operationalize regimes at the domestic level can provide opportunities for line agencies to pursue political agendas that have little to do with the goals of the regime as such. Budgetary Politics Operationalization, particularly when it involves substantive projects like those outlined in the Barents Programme, is costly. It will come as no surprise, then, that one component of the political dynamic of domestic Operationalization revolves around the competition for scarce resources. Unlike administrative politics and bureaucratic politics, which tend to involve interactions among agencies within the executive branch of government, budgetary politics feature interactions between agencies responsible for actually carrying out programs and legislatures or legislative committees with authority over the appropriation of financial resources. Of course, agencies have some discretion in the use of funds allocated to them. And when parties in power in parliamentary systems command solid majorities, the separation between the executive and legislative branches of government with regard to budgetary matters is not great. In most cases, however, agencies must satisfy a variety of legislative concerns in order to secure funding needed to carry out projects like expanding the network of protected natural areas in the Arctic or improving the infrastructure linking the various parts of the Barents Region. In cases like the AEPS and the BEAR, where the efforts of line agencies are not rooted in implementing legislation, legislative groups are likely to be particularly sensitive to executive actions, and the game of budgetary politics can become unusually convoluted. 44. In Norway there are a number of organizations—e.g., the Norwegian Polar Institute, the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA), Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU), and the State Pollution Control Authority—that maintain an identity of their own even while operating under the auspices of the ministry of the environment.

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At the same time, the need to find material resources for programmatic activities can lead to a variety of creative approaches to funding. Sometimes it is possible to justify funding for specific projects called for under the terms of a regime by appealing to some larger public purpose. Norway, for instance, provided start-up funding for many BEAR activities as an element of its larger policy of strengthening the economic and social fabric of the country's northern counties. In other cases, there are opportunities to piggyback on funds appropriated for other purposes. The United States Congress, for example, funded the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to conduct a threeyear study of the problem of nuclear contamination in the Russian Arctic, and some of the work carried out with these funds has produced results of value to AMAE45 Beyond this, programs developed to meet the goals of regimes like the AEPS and the BEAR may be orchestrated in ways that make them eligible for outside funding from sources like the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), or the European Union. All three of these sources took an interest during the 1990s in rebuilding the Russian economy, and the promoters of the BEAR were quick to publicize the Barents Region as a vehicle for the reconstruction of northwestern Russia that should receive favorable treatment from these funders.46 Nor should we overlook the prospect of using modest public funds to leverage private investment in projects of interest to those responsible for operationalizing regimes. To illustrate, the efforts of the Finnish Barents Group, a consortium of private companies looking for opportunities to make profitable investments in the Barents Region, were encouraged by public policymakers responsible for operationalizing the BEAR in Finland. None of these approaches offers any guarantee of success in a world of intense competition for scarce resources. But they do remind us that the domain of budgetary politics extends well beyond traditional concerns regarding direct appropriations to government agencies to carry out specific commitments spelled out in international agreements. Advocacy Politics All governments are susceptible to varying degrees to pressures from outside groups representing the interests of well-defined constituencies. Much has been written about the efforts of interest groups to influence or even to 45. On the idea of connecting these activities, see letter dated 14 September 1992 from Ned A. Ostenso, assistant administrator of the NOAA, to Erich W. Bretthauer, assistant administrator of EPA (on file with author). For details of the actual research program, see Department of Defense, "Nuclear Pollution in Arctic Seas: Preliminary Report to Congress," 1 December 1993 (on file with author). 46. Kvistad, "The Barents Spirit," chap. 6.

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capture agencies engaged in regulatory activities directed toward the groups in question.47 But it is worth emphasizing that the domain of advocacy politics extends as well to activities carried out under the terms of programmatic regimes such as the AEPS and the BEAR. In the United States, for example, environmental groups like the Audubon Society, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the World Wildlife Fund developed Arctic programs in the early 1990s and sought to influence American efforts to operationalize the AMAP and CAFF. A number of them subsequently banded together to form an Arctic Network, which, among other functions, ensures that concerns of environmental advocacy groups are heard by the AEPS.48 In Canada, by contrast, groups representing the interests of indigenous peoples acquired a particularly strong voice in connection with CAFF, an organization for which Canada acted to provide the secretariat and assume the role of lead country. In the Barents Region, a number of companies that make or use relatively clean technologies saw the BEAR as a means of orchestrating complex deals allowing them to install their technologies as part of the process of reconstructing industries located in northwestern Russia. Of course, regimes vary in the extent to which they provide opportunities for advocacy politics, and political systems vary in the extent to which they encourage participation on the part of advocacy groups. The American political system, for example, is well known as a fertile field for advocacy politics, and the case of the AEPS is no exception. The same individuals move back and forth freely between official positions and positions in industry and the environmental community in the United States.49 There is good reason to believe that public officials actually encouraged the creation of the Arctic Network, in part as a way of stimulating public pressure on their own agencies to be responsive to environmental interests. The Nordic political systems, by contrast, are less open than the American and Canadian systems to the impact of advocacy politics. In the highly centralized Finnish system, for instance, the Foreign Ministry and the Environment Ministry appear to make decisions about matters like the operationalization of the AEPS with little input from advocacy groups. The evidence suggests as well that the AEPS has provided more opportunities than the BEAR for the play of advocacy politics within members countries. This may be attributable, in 47. For a well-known expression of the capture theory, see George J. Stigler, "The Theory of Economic Regulation," Bell Journal of Economics 5 (1971): 1-13. 48. The Arctic Network describes itself as "a cooperative effort among Native, environmental, and health organizations." Based in Anchorage, it publishes an occasional newsletter called Leads: Arctic Network News Summary. 49. A well-known Arctic example is Scott Hajost, who has held senior positions in the Environmental Protection Agency and the Environmental Defense Fund and who is now the executive director of the Washington office of the World Conservation Union (IUCN).

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considerable measure, to participation in the AEPS of the United States, which has pressed persistently for a policy of opening up AEPS activities to participation on the part of a wide range of nonstate actors. In part, it is probably an outgrowth of the facts that the political systems of Fennoscandia are not as open to advocacy politics as the American system and that the BEAR has been cast, especially by the Norwegians and the Russians, as a matter of high politics to be guided by senior policymakers located in the foreign ministries. Still, no account of the formation of the AEPS and the BEAR can be complete without some reference to the role of advocacy politics during the stage of operationalization. National Vignettes Unlike operationalization at the international level, domestic operationalization is affected directly by variations among member countries in terms of their national interests, political structures, and policy cultures. Under the circumstances, there is no substitute for looking at the behavior of individual members of regimes in the effort to come to terms with domestic operationalization. In this section, I comment on the performance of five countries in connection with the operationalization of the AEPS and the BEAR: Finland, Norway, Canada, Russia, and the United States. The two Nordic countries are of obvious interest because they are members of both regimes and because the AEPS resulted from what is widely known as the Finnish Initiative while the BEAR took shape as a product of the Norwegian Initiative. For their part, Canada, Russia, and the United States are important because they are the big three of the Arctic world. Canada's role in the AEPS has been influenced by the concomitant Canadian Initiative calling for the establishment of an Arctic Council.50 Russia is a member of both the AEPS and the BEAR and possesses the largest Arctic domains of any country. The United States, as the only remaining superpower, constitutes a presence in the Arctic that cannot be ignored, especially when American policymakers drag their feet with regard to Arctic initiatives. Finland The story of Finnish participation in the AEPS and the BEAR features a progression from champion to laggard and back again to supporter of in50. For the background regarding this Canadian Initiative, see David Scrivener, "Environmental Cooperation in the Arctic From Strategy to Council," Oslo: Norwegian Atlantic Committee, 1996.

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ternational cooperation in the Arctic. Despite the fact that the AEPS is known as the Finnish Initiative, Finland played a surprisingly low-key role in operationalizing the regime during the period following the adoption of the Rovaniemi Declaration. Heikki Sisula of the Environment Ministry became chairman of the AMAP Task Force. But at the domestic level, little happened. A number of factors seem to have contributed to this turning inward with regard to Arctic cooperation in the early 1990s. Shortly after the signing of the Rovaniemi Declaration, Finland entered into an economic slump that was to become the country's most serious downturn of the postwar period. The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 not only undermined a sizable portion of Finland's export trade but also led to a preoccupation with the potential for political instability to the East. A rapid turnover of senior personnel in the Foreign Ministry made matters worse with regard to the AEPS by causing a loss of continuity at the policy level. Taken together, these problems generated renewed doubts about the extent to which Finland should present itself as an Arctic country. Initially at least, the establishment of the BEAR in January 1993 did little to alter this situation. In fact, Finnish policymakers had a number of reasons to be skeptical about the Norwegian Initiative. The leadership of Norway in creating the Barents Region offended the sensibilities of Finnish policymakers who felt that their country possessed a special or even unique capacity for handling interactions between Russia and the West. Finland was the key player in developing the Adjacent Areas Activities of the North Calotte Committee, which operated under the Nordic Council of Ministers and which seemed to many Finns a more appropriate vehicle than the Barents Region for organizing cooperation with Russia. Finland felt a stronger pull than Norway to devote attention and resources to the reconstituted Baltic regime.51 To make matters more difficult, the dual system of the BEAR was difficult to fit into the country's highly centralized political system without raising uncomfortable questions of a more generic nature about intergovernmental relations in Finland. Despite these inauspicious beginnings, Finland has emerged more recently as a vigorous participant in the AEPS and the BEAR combined as a kind of Arctic package. With the active support of the Environment Ministry, Finland assumed the role of lead country for the development of both an Arctic Biodiversity Strategy and a system of environmental impact assessment guidelines under the auspices of the AEPS. Finland assumed the 51. For a helpful discussion of the larger context within which these issues evolved, see Jyrki Kakonen, "What Happened to Neutrality? Finnish and Swedish Foreign Policies after the Cold War," unpublished paper on file with author.

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chair of the Barents Council in September 1994, and the government took a friendly interest in promoting the "gateway" concept of the Finnish Barents Group, an industry consortium formed to enhance the role of Finland in investment activities stimulated by the BEAR.52 Through a strategy of linking activities called for under the AEPS and the BEAR, the Finnish government appeared by the mid-1990s to have come up with a persuasive rationale for devoting attention to Arctic matters. The creation of the Finnish Polar Commission, an interagency coordinating body, has helped to operationalize this strategy. Several factors account for this turnaround in Finnish performance. The Finnish economy began to rebound, and Finnish policymakers came to see the BEAR as a mechanism that might enable Finnish companies to play an important role in the reconstruction of northwestern Russia. Finnish membership in the European Union (especially in combination with Norwegian abstinence) has cast Finland in a distinctive role as a facilitator of the integration of Russia into Europe. More generally, the emergence of the Arctic as a policy relevant region has encouraged Finland to reemphasize its desire to be accepted as an Arctic country. Norway The Norwegian story, in contrast to that of Finland, is marked by a steady progression from skeptic to supporter to champion with regard to the operationalization of the AEPS and the BEAR. Today, we are inclined to see Norway as a standard bearer of Arctic cooperation willing to provide resources as well as rhetoric for new initiatives in this realm. But this was not always true. Norway experienced a process of turning outward with regard to the AEPS, starting with the country's growing commitment to the AMAP and progressing first to a rising interest in CAFF and, more recently, to a leading role in PAME. Largely the work of the Environment Ministry at the operational level, this development acquired increasing support within the Foreign Ministry with the passage of time. With the coming of the BEAR, moreover, the Norwegian Foreign Ministry assumed a leading role in operationalizing Norway's Arctic endeavors. Treated as a matter of high politics and reflecting the outcome of an intense debate within the ministry, the operationalization of the BEAR became a priority matter for the Foreign Ministry.53 As a result, the ministry assumed a commanding 52. The "gateway" concept refers to the idea that Finland may provide commercial access to northwestern Russia. As the Polar Commission of Finland puts it, "Government measures should improve the operating conditions for ... companies by making it attractive for them to move their capital through Finland, developing a variety of service functions and acting to provide a support infrastructure in Finland" (Polar Commission of Finland, "Finnish Strategy for Operations in the Arctic," 6 April 1994, 8). 53. Kvistad, "The Barents Spirit."

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role in the Operationalization of this initiative, assigning personnel to the project, orchestrating a remarkable program of meetings dealing with Barents Region affairs, and channeling substantial funds into activities designed to breathe life into the Barents Region. None of this diminished the interest of the Environment Ministry in Arctic issues, especially those arising in connection with the AEPS. The result proved to be a powerful combination that propelled Norway into a prominent leadership role with regard to Arctic cooperation. A number of forces came together to produce this striking development in Norway's Arctic endeavors. In contrast to others, the Norwegian economy remained strong during the 1990s, so that Norway found itself in a relatively favorable position to flex its muscles with regard to Arctic issues when it chose to do so for policy reasons. The government of Norway was committed to a concerted effort to strengthen the economic and social fabric of the northern counties—Nordland, Troms, and Finnmark—during these years. Through the work of the Brundtland Commission and a number of related initiatives, Norway also carved out for itself a role as a leading supporter of international environmental action.54 The fact that Norway's position on whaling was unpopular at the international level made the country all the more interested in cementing its leadership role regarding other environmental concerns. But above all, Norway's growing support for the AEPS and vigorous backing of the BEAR in the 1990s reflected a major reassessment of Norwegian policy in the post—Cold War setting. Today, Norway's Arctic endeavors rest on a coherent vision regarding the emerging political architecture of Europe rather than on ad hoc calculations regarding a number of discrete issues with little political content. Articulated by Stoltenberg and his successors at the Foreign Ministry, this vision came to provide a solid base for both programmatic and funding decisions regarding Norwegian participation in the AEPS and, especially, the BEAR. It is probably correct to say that Arctic cooperation acquired a higher priority in political terms among Norwegian policymakers during this period than among their counterparts in any of the other countries considered in this analysis of the AEPS and the BEAR.55 Canada Building on its role as a booster during the negotiations leading to the Rovaniemi Declaration, Canada emerged as a generally enthusiastic member of 54. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future. 55. For a recent confirmation of Norway's commitment to the BEAR, see the statement of Foreign Minister Bjorn Tore Godal to the Storting on 24 April 1995 (an English language text of this speech is available electronically on the Barents List).

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the AEPS during the stage of operationalization.56 Canada provided the secretariat for CAFF and pushed hard to expand the attention devoted to the concerns of indigenous peoples under the AEPS. Above all, Canada became the prime mover in creating the Task Force on Sustainable Development and Utilization approved in principle in the declaration issued in conjunction with the second AEPS ministerial meeting in September 1993. A number of forces coalesced to produce this result.57 Whereas most other members of the Arctic Eight are temperate zone societies with some Arctic possessions, Canada—along with Russia—is a northern country in geopolitical and, to some degree, cultural terms.58 As a primary player in the circumpolar world, Canada has long advocated a policy of treating the Arctic as a policy relevant region, although this declaratory stance has not always been backed up by the commitment of material resources. The growing voice of the indigenous peoples of the Canadian North during the 1980s and 1990s has served to focus attention in Canada on northern issues. Above all, the government of Canada treated the AEPS as a stepping stone on the route to creating the Arctic Council, an idea that Canada promoted from the time of Brian Mulroney's November 1989 Leningrad speech and that became known in Arctic circles as the Canadian Initiative. In this setting, energizing the AEPS and moving it toward broader concerns like those implicit in the concept of sustainable development proved easy to justify as part of a strategy aimed at launching the Arctic Council. Nonetheless, a number of factors served to circumscribe Canada's ability to operationalize the AEPS at the domestic level. As in the United States, a variety of federal agencies, including the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND), Environment Canada (DOE), the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), and the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), as well as the Department of External Affairs (now Foreign Affairs and International Trade), emerged as significant players in the process of operationalizing the AEPS. Despite periodic efforts to rectify the situation, the federal government did not succeed in creating an effective interagency body to coordinate the activities of these players in support of the AEPS. What is more, Canada, which has the most decentralized political 56. Although Canada is not a member of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region, a Canadian representative was present as an observer at the January 1993 Kirkenes meeting, and Stoltenberg made a point of encouraging interest in the BEAR on the part of other Arctic countries. 57. See James Lee and Gerald Schmitz, "Canada and Circumpolar Cooperation: Meeting the Foreign Policy Challenge," essay prepared by the Research Branch of the Library of Parliament for the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 2 April 1996. 58. Hamelin, Canadian Nordicity.

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system among the Arctic Eight, has been engaged for some time in a process of devolution and restructuring regarding the political organization of its northern territories. This may eventually produce an even stronger concern within the country regarding Arctic affairs. Once operational, for instance, the government of Nunavut will certainly assume a prominent role in articulating the concerns of indigenous peoples regarding environmental protection in the Arctic.59 During the Operationalization stage of the AEPS, however, this preoccupation with domestic structure served to distract Canadian attention from the specific matters addressed in the AEPS Action Plan. Beyond this, Canada has faced severe budget deficits at the federal level throughout the 1990s. This has necessitated sizable funding cuts in departments like DIAND, DOE, and DFO, affecting their capacity to take the lead on matters pertaining to the AEPS. Given the fact that federal funds make up a large proportion of the revenue available to the governments of the Yukon and Northwest Territories, moreover, budget crises in Ottawa affected the ability of the territorial governments as well as federal agencies to take concrete actions toward operationalizing the AEPS Action Plan.60 Russia The story of Russian efforts to operationalize the AEPS and the BEAR domestically is one of enthusiasm at the level of policy coupled with declining resources and turmoil on the ground. As an expression of its support, the Soviet Union sent a deputy prime minister to sign the Rovaniemi Declaration. Yet the attempted coup of August 1991 followed almost immediately, and the end of the year brought the final collapse of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation's assumption of responsibility for international commitments of the Soviet Union, including those contained in the AEPS. Of course, Russia, in contrast to the Soviet Union, is overwhelmingly a northern country.61 If anything, the economic crisis besetting the country impacted the Russian North even more severely than other areas of the country. And the Norwegian Initiative, emerging opportunely during 1992 and 1993, offered the prospect of substantial economic assistance for efforts to reconstruct the economy of the northwestern part of the country. It is not surprising, under the circumstances, that Russia endorsed the idea 59. The Nunavut Territory and government will come into existence officially on 1 April 1999. The transition is being handled by the Nunavut Implementation Commission, with John Amagoalik serving as chief commissioner. 60. Dickerson, Whose North? 61. Kotlyakov and Agranat, "Global Changes and Northern Regions," observe that the North occupies 69 percent of the Russian Federation in contrast to 49 percent of the Soviet Union.

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of the BEAR enthusiastically and that Foreign Minister Kozyrev took a personal interest in efforts to follow up on the Kirkenes Declaration. As expected, then, Russia remained bullish on Arctic cooperation at the declaratory level through the operationalization stages of both the AEPS and the BEAR. But a number of developments have severely limited Russia's capacity to make good on its commitments at the domestic level. As in Canada, a variety of Russian federal agencies, including the Ministry of the Environment (Minpriroda), the State Committee on Hydrometeorolgy (Hydromet), the Ministry of Nationalities, the Ministry of Transportation, and the State Committee on Northern Development (Goskomsever), as well as the Foreign Ministry, sought roles in operationalizing the AEPS and the BEAR. A series of structural changes during the early 1990s (for example, the growing role of Minpriroda and the disestablishment of Goskomsever as a separate entity) served to complicate this picture.62 As a result, much has been left to interagency coordinating devices, the Interagency Commission on Arctic and Antarctic Affairs in the case of the AEPS, and the Interagency Commission on the Barents Region in the case of the BEAR. Despite its recent establishment, the Barents Region Commission, headed by the foreign minister, emerged during the operationalization stage of the BEAR as a more effective instrument than the older, Arctic and Antarctic Commission, chaired by Vladimir Kuramin, who was at the time deputy minister of nationalities. To this we must add some observations relating to the pervasive debate over decentralization in the Russian Federation during the 1990s. In general, the center proved more successful in controlling activities relating to the operationalization of the AEPS than in controlling parallel efforts with regard to the BEAR. In the case of the AMAP, for example, the All Russian Research Institute for Nature Protection, an organization operating under the auspices of Minpriroda, acquired the leading role. But even in this connection, those working to operationalize the AMAP found themselves turning in the search for data to powerful organizations like Gasprom, a newly privatized entity controlling oil and gas production in the Russian North. In the case of the BEAR, by contrast, there was no way for the center to dominate the operationalization process. Given the array of concrete projects included in the Barents Programme and the prospect of obtaining external funding to implement some of them, in fact, the regional governments located in Archangel, Murmansk, and Petrozavodsk 62. Of particular note in connection with this study is the fact that Goskomsever was disbanded shortly after its creation and therefore disappeared as a player in the process of operationalizing the AEPS and the BEAR. In 1995, the government established a new Ministry of Northern Affairs, with Vladimir Kuramin as minister.

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were able to move vigorously to capture a sizable chunk of the action involved in operationalizing the BEAR. Underlying all these structural issues were the continuing uncertainties about Russia's political future and the profound economic problems facing the country during the 1990s. A succession of political crises (for instance, the showdown between the president and parliament in the fall of 1993, the Chechnya imbroglio starting at the end of 1994) diverted the attention of Russian policymakers from more mundane matters like those involved in operationalizing the AEPS and even the BEAR. While industrial collapse alleviated some environmental problems (for example, industrial emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxides), Russia's economic problems often marginalized concern for environmental issues at the policy level63 and distorted efforts to operationalize the broader program articulated in connection with the development of the Barents Region. All this has not eliminated Russian interest in the AEPS and, especially, the BEAR. Russia has played an important role in broadening the AMAP's scope to include matters of human health and pushing forward CAFF's initiative relating to protected natural areas.64 Russia has also been an active participant in efforts to upgrade the infrastructure of the Barents Region. Yet the lack of financial resources and the growing doubts in Russia about the relevance of government initiatives constituted major impediments to the operationalization of the AEPS and the BEAR at the domestic level. United States The story of American participation in the Operationalization of the AEPS presents a strikingly different picture. Starting as an outspoken skeptic, the United States slowly became more positive in its attitude toward the AEPS, and this had some impact on domestic Operationalization. The obstacles to effective Operationalization in the United States were severe. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) extracted an explicit promise that the establishment of the AEPS would not lead to requests from line agencies for additional funding as the price of its agreement to sign off on the Rovaniemi Declaration at the outset. Given the absence of implementing legislation, this prohibition produced a distinct lack of enthusiasm for new obligations on the part of agencies already facing tight budgets and difficulties meeting existing commitments. As in Canada, responsibility for carrying out AEPS mandates is divided among a number of line agencies, including 63. Murray Feshbach, Ecological Disaster: Cleaning Up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet Regime, New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995. 64. In September 1995, Russia hosted back-to-back meetings of the AMAP and CAFF. See WWF Arctic Bulletin, no. 2.95: 4-5.

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the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and the Coast Guard (CG), which share a deep concern about their budgetary problems even though they differ significantly in the extent to which the concerns of the AEPS are of interest to them. Under the circumstances, the problem of interagency coordination loomed large in the American case, just as it did in Canada and Russia. Like the Russian Federation, the United States has an Arctic coordinating mechanism, the Interagency Arctic Policy Group (LAPG), whose establishment predates the creation of the AEPS. But the LAPG is chaired by the Department of State, which did not share the perspectives of the line agencies regarding the concrete steps required to operationalize the AEPS, and this interagency mechanism has never achieved a high level of effectiveness at the policy level.65 Despite these obstacles, American efforts to operationalize the AEPS met with increased success with the passage of time. Some of the relevant line agencies (for example, the FWS in connection with CAFF) developed considerable enthusiasm for their elements of the AEPS Action Plan. Several agencies had some success in tapping funds provided for somewhat related purposes (for instance, the funds allocated to the Office of Naval Research to deal with nuclear contamination in the Russian Arctic) to provide the means to undertake projects relevant to the objectives of the AEPS. The Clinton administration ordered a review of U.S. Arctic policy shortly after coming into office in 1993. Although the resultant "new policy for the Arctic region" was frustratingly slow to materialize, it was announced eventually in conjunction with an AEPS event and contains language that is far more favorable to the AEPS than prior statements of U.S. Arctic policy.66 The new statement speaks of "protecting the Arctic environment and conserving its biological resources" as a policy principle and calls for an expansion of "cooperation under the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy."67 Equally important, a number of major environmental NGOs based in the United States—including the Audubon Society, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Wilderness Society, and the American branch of the World Wildlife Fund—began to take an interest in the Arctic in the 1990s and seized on the AEPS as a good vehicle for cutting into Arctic issues. These developments did not eliminate the impediments outlined in the preceding paragraph; American support for the work of the AMAP, for example, remained 65. Osherenko and Young, Age of the Arctic, chap. 8. 66. The event was the CAFF Working Group meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, 26-28 September 1994. 67. For the full text, see "Fact Sheet—U.S. Arctic Policy," Office of Public Communication, U.S. Department of State, 1 December 1994.

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embarrassingly inadequate. But taken together, they produced some real gains in American efforts to support the AEPS during the course of the operationalization stage. The Political Dynamic of Operationalization It is time now to revisit the hypotheses about the political dynamics of regime formation set forth in Chapter 1 with a clear picture of the Operationalization stage in mind. The facts that Operationalization takes place at two distinct levels and that there are substantial variations in the domestic political systems of member states makes it difficult to generalize about the political dynamic of Operationalization. Nonetheless, there are a number of differences between the dynamic of this stage in all its manifestations and the dynamics of the stages of agenda formation and negotiation that are worth mentioning. With regard to driving forces, Operationalization is typically a story of the interplay between material conditions and interest-based political maneuvering. All regimes, but especially programmatic arrangements like the AEPS and the BEAR, require infusions of resources to operate successfully. Yet the material resources needed to undertake new programs are chronically in short supply. This suggests two conclusions regarding the political dynamic of Operationalization. The willingness of government agencies to make a concerted effort to implement international commitments is highly sensitive to the occurrence of budget deficits in public accounts and, by implication, to fluctuations in the performance of national economies. It is not surprising, then, that Norway has done more to operationalize the AEPS and the BEAR than many other members, that Finland did relatively little to get the AEPS up and running during 1991-93, and that Russia has been unable to match its declaratory support for these regimes with a substantial investment of material resources. Within the limits set by the availability of material resources, commitment on the part of senior policymakers emerges as an important driving force. In the case of Norway, for example, where Stoltenberg and his successors stood solidly behind the BEAR, the government was prepared to invest heavily in activities needed to get the regime up and running. Compare this with the case of the United States, where OMB staunchly opposed any allocation of new funds to fulfill American assignments under the AEPS Action Plan. As the preceding comments imply, there are two distinct cases to be considered in thinking about the players involved in operationalizing international regimes. When regimes are expressions of coherent national policies articulated at a high level, the key players are senior officials who are

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politically influential in their own right, in contrast to mid-level officials who administer programs on behalf of line agencies. When such arrangements are products of lower-level initiatives, by contrast, administrative and bureaucratic politics take over, and a variety of players are likely to get into the act. In the first case, a relatively small number of powerful policymakers (for example, Stoltenberg in the case of the BEAR) are likely to call the shots when it comes to operationalization. Unless representatives of nonstate actors have personal access to and influence with senior officials, they are unlikely to be able to exercise much control over the process of regime operationalization. In the second case, political fragmentation is a common occurrence as a number of agencies jockey for position in the absence of clear directives from above. For the most part, the second case is likely to offer more opportunities for nonstate actors to wield influence. They are not only likely to have better access to mid-level officials, but these officials are also likely to be susceptible to outside influence in the absence of clear directives from above. In both cases, individuals can and often do play important roles in the operationalization process. The obvious commitment of Stoltenberg and subsequently Hoist to the BEAR was certainly critical in ensuring that the Norwegian Foreign Ministry was able to allocate funds to the effort to follow up on the Kirkenes Declaration. Quite apart from the economic problems facing the country, both the turnover of foreign ministers in Finland and the lack of a firm commitment to the BEAR on the part of any one of them undoubtedly contributed to the disparity between Norwegian and Finnish efforts to operationalize the provisions of this regime in the aftermath of the January 1993 Kirkenes Declaration. Individuals also play important roles in cases like the AEPS, where there is little involvement on the part of foreign ministers or other high-ranking officials. But in such cases, individuals are important more for their willingness to stick their necks out to defend international commitments in the day-to-day infighting of bureaucratic and budgetary politics than for their ability to articulate a government's commitment to a particular initiative in a credible fashion. People like Raymond Arnaudo of the United States, Jan Arvesen and Jan Thompson of Norway, Desiree Edmar of Sweden, and Leslie Whitby of Canada, who played roles of some significance in operationalizing the AEPS but who were generally unknown outside a small circle of specialists, exemplify this category of individuals. With regard to collective-action problems during the stage of operationalization, the experience of the AEPS and the BEAR suggests two conclusions. As the original hypothesis suggests, asymmetries in the efforts of individual members can become a problem in this context. The fact that

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Canada, Denmark, and Norway made substantial contributions to cover the costs incurred by the AMAP in developing the State of the Arctic Environment Report while the United States lagged far behind in this realm, for example, produced frustration and even hard feelings in some quarters. At another level, the fact that Russia's financial crisis led some highranking Russian officials to look at the BEAR primarily as a mechanism for obtaining western funds distorted the vision articulated in the Kirkenes Declaration in some respects. But beyond this, efforts to operationalize regimes like the AEPS and the BEAR can get caught up in processes of administrative, bureaucratic, and budgetary politics that have little or nothing to do with the regimes themselves but that can block operationalization altogether or produce results that are hard to relate to the visions set forth in constitutive documents like the Rovaniemi and Kirkenes Declarations. The substantive character of the resultant distortions will vary from country to country and from case to case. But given the prevalence of such problems within individual regime members, their cumulative impact on the transition from paper to practice with regard to multilateral governance systems can be profound. As with the other stages of regime formation, context matters when it comes to Operationalization. But to be more specific, the evidence from the AEPS and the BEAR suggests that economic and political developments at the domestic level are the critical contextual factors affecting the stage of Operationalization. Sometimes these factors are dramatic and farreaching. Perhaps the most striking case encountered in this study is the economic and political disruption occasioned by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transfer of its international commitments to the Russian Federation. Not only did this development divert attention from issues like environmental protection, but it also raised profound questions regarding intergovernmental relations within the Russian Federation that were bound to have consequences for the Operationalization of the AEPS and the BEAR. Other contextual influences of a somewhat less dramatic character also played a role with regard to the Operationalization of the AEPS and the BEAR. Thus, there is no denying the negative impact of Finland's economic slump during the early 1990s on that country's capacity to follow through on assignments under the AEPS. By the same token, contextual factors can have positive effects on Operationalization. The devolution of authority to the northern territories and the move toward creating Nunavut in Canada, for example, amplified the voice of northern residents (including indigenous peoples) and strengthened the resolve of the national government in Ottawa to meet Canada's international obligations under arrangements like the AEPS. Similarly, the inauguration of

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the Clinton administration in the United States increased the receptivity of American policymakers to international cooperation in the field of environmental protection and produced a new U.S. Arctic policy statement containing a strong and explicit commitment to the AEPS. 68 The tactics of the operationalization stage are those of administrative, bureaucratic, budgetary, and advocacy politics. But in this connection, it will help to differentiate three cases that emerge from an examination of the AEPS and the BEAR. Intra-agency politics become important when the initiation of a new program (for example, activities designed to provide the national inputs the AMAP needs to develop the State of the Arctic Environment Report) is seen by others located within the same agency as a threat to the political or budgetary welfare of their own programs. The resultant bureaucratic infighting is exemplified by the struggle within the EPA regarding American participation in the AEPS. Interagency politics, by contrast, loom large when different agencies or departments become embroiled in contests whose object is to capture a piece of the action arising from international commitments or, in some cases, to foist unwanted assignments off onto others. The competition between Minpriroda and Hydromet in Russia regarding AMAP activities and between the Kirkenes and Lulea Secretariats regarding staff support for the BEAR's Regional Council are good examples of the administrative battles that arise in such cases. Beyond this, there are the interactive politics that surface when outside advocacy groups endeavor to bring pressure to bear on government agencies to take action regarding the fulfillment of specific commitments or to highlight particular problems. The efforts of Greenpeace to move the issue of nuclear contamination to the top of the AEPS agenda in the United States and of Bellona to do the same in Norway are good examples. The hallmark of all these tactical processes is that they flourish in situations in which unambiguous legislative mandates or high-level executive commitments are lacking. The result is a complex brew of interest-based politics. This discussion of the operationalization stage suggests two observations about institutional design that are worth emphasizing here. At the international level, it seems clear that organizational capacity matters. Programs like the AMAP and CAFF, which have secretariats of their own, have a clear advantage over PAME and EPPR, which must rely on ad hoc staffing arrangements.69 Similarly, the operation of the Regional Council, 68. Ibid. The statement endorses a plan to "expand cooperation under the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy." 69. For a more general analysis of the role of secretariats in connection with international regimes, see "International Secretariats: Background Paper for the Workshop at the Rockefeller Brothers Conference Center," Pocantico, New York, 15-18 June 1995 (on file with author).

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along with its working groups and secretariats, has proved important in allowing the counties and oblasts belonging to the BEAR to play a key role in shaping the Barents Programme. When we turn to the domestic level, the diversity of national political systems makes it hard to arrive at any general conclusions. Yet one thing that does seem clear is the need to devise effective procedures for interagency coordination in operationalizing multifaceted programmatic initiatives like those called for in the AEPS and the BEAR. This is not an easy requirement to meet in practice.70 Despite the creation of the Canadian Polar Commission, Canada still has no comprehensive interagency coordinating mechanism for Arctic affairs. The Interagency Arctic Policy Group in the United States and the Interagency Commission on Arctic and Antarctic Affairs in Russia are both weak. The division of labor between the latter and the Interagency Commission on the Barents Region is unclear. In general, a study of experience with interagency coordination in the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR reveals that such mechanisms will not prove effective unless high-level participants take them seriously. Although individual agencies are often able to administer their own programs successfully, adjudicating conflicts or exploiting complementarities between or among agencies requires an exercise of political will.

70. Osherenko and Young, Age of the Arctic, chap. 8.

C H A P T E R SIX

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T

he creation stories of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR) are now complete. Both these regimes have proved to be dynamic in that they have evolved continuously from their inception to the present. But events unfolding beyond the September 1993 ministerial meeting in the case of the AEPS and the September 1994 foreign ministers' meeting in the case of the BEAR are properly treated as occurring after the end of the stage of operationalization; they belong to the period of day-to-day operation of these ventures in institutionalized cooperation. It is appropriate, therefore, to step back at this point and ask what insights this study has produced concerning the phenomenon of regime formation in international society. Optimism about the prospects for formulating simple generalizations stating necessary or sufficient conditions for international regimes to come into existence has faded over the last decade of research on this subject. The process of regime formation is much too contingent and therefore elusive to yield straightforward propositions of this sort.1 Yet regime formation is a recurrent, even routine, activity in international society—a fact that provides us with a sizable universe of cases in terms of which to vet new ideas about the nature of the process. This book suggests that one of the problems facing efforts to construct generalizations about regime formation is that the process involves three distinct stages—agenda formation, negotiation, and operationalization—and that each of these stages has a political dynamic of its own. What can be said on the basis of the analysis set forth in the preceding chapters about the merits of this thesis and the implications of this argument for future research on the creation of international regimes? This question is answered in this chapter in a series of related steps. First, I revisit the specific hypotheses set forth in Chapter 1 in the light of the conclusions about the political dynamics of each of the three stages developed in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. Next, I raise questions about the generalizability of 1. See Young and Osherenko, eds., Polar Politics, esp. chap. 7.

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findings derived from an in-depth analysis of the AEPS and the BEAR. The third section explores the implications of this analysis of the stages of regime formation for some of the most interesting and influential arguments about regime formation that have emerged in recent years as products of the new institutionalism in international relations.2 This is followed by a discussion of priorities for future research on regime formation suggested by the findings in this book. The final section turns to the matter of implications for practitioners. If the conclusions set forth here are correct, practitioners have no choice about participating in the different stages of regime formation. There is no way to initiate negotiations without proceeding through the stage of agenda formation, or to skip from agenda formation to operationalization and bypass the stage of negotiation. A recognition of the differences in the political dynamics associated with the three stages may help practitioners on all sides to avoid costly mistakes and to tailor their efforts to the task at hand throughout the process of regime formation. Revisiting the Hypotheses A prominent feature of the hypotheses set forth in Chapter 1 is that they all focus on contrasts or differences among the three stages of regime formation. These hypotheses do not seek to compare the process of regime formation with other forms of interactive decisionmaking in international society. Nor do they point to differences between successful and unsuccessful efforts to establish institutional arrangements. Rather, they emphasize the distinctive political dynamics of agenda formation, negotiation, and operationalization. Accordingly, the case studies presented in the preceding chapters provide a useful basis for making a preliminary assessment of the merits of the resultant expectations about the political dynamics of regime formation. To pursue this theme, the following paragraphs return to the initial hypotheses one-by-one, starting in each case with a capsule statement of the hypothesis and proceeding to reflect on its merits in the light of the evidence developed in the preceding chapters. Driving Forces This hypothesis addresses the roles of material conditions (especially power), interests, and ideas in the process of regime formation, suggesting that ideas are particularly prominent during agenda formation, interests dominate the stage of negotiation, and power emerges with particular clarity 2. For an introduction to the new institutionalism in international relations, see Young, International Governance, introduction.

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during the transition from paper to practice. Broadly speaking, the cases discussed lend support to this hypothesis, but in each instance there is an interesting twist on the underlying reasoning involved. The role of ideas was, in fact, a central feature of the stage of agenda formation in the cases of the AEPS (from fall 1987 to September 1989) and the BEAR (from fall 1991 to April 1992). But there is little evidence in these cases that this involved the emergence of either consensual knowledge regarding the problem at hand or a transnational epistemic community linking policymakers and scientists with common perspectives on the problem and its solution.3 Rather, the role of ideas in both cases centered on the articulation of a generative vision that served as a point of departure for the development of a common discourse.4 In the case of the AEPS, it was the idea of the Arctic as a policy relevant region and of the Arctic Eight as the proper grouping of actors to engage in regime building for this region; the focus on environmental issues was merely an attractive and relatively uncontroversial vehicle for trying out this new approach to northern issues. With regard to the BEAR, it was the idea of a Euro-Arctic Region that could, at one and the same time, provide Europeans with an Arctic of their own and offer a mechanism for integrating post-Soviet Russia into Europe. Although it is clear that the entire process of regime formation involves interactions among self-interested actors, it is fair to say that the negotiation stage accentuates this feature of the process. Yet the character of the negotiation stage differs markedly from the picture of bargaining that has been framed for us by those who focus on distributive contests over well-defined negotiation sets or, as Stephen Krasner has put it, on "life on the Pareto frontier."5 The facts that integrative efforts are common, Pareto frontiers are never definitively identified, and consensus is highly valued in this setting endow the negotiation stage of regime formation with a dynamic that features far more give-and-take than the dynamic of threats, promises, and committal tactics that suffuses analyses of distributive bargaining. Power does loom large in the stage of operationalization, but here the two cases suggest rather different interpretations. In both cases, it is clear that material resources in such forms as personnel, equipment, and programmatic capacity are keys to the process of operationalization—in other words, that money talks. In the case of the BEAR, Stoltenberg's commitment to the success of the Norwegian Initiative unlocked material resources 3. For a spectrum of views regarding the role of ideas as sources of international cooperation, see Haas, ed., Knowledge, Power, and International Policy Coordination. 4. For an account of the importance of the development of a common discourse in the case of stratospheric ozone, see Litfin, Ozone Discourses. 5. Krasner, "Global Communications and National Power."

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and led to a willingness on the part of Norway (by way of the Foreign Ministry's budget) to inject resources needed to get the BEAR off to a prompt start.6 Lacking any such high-level political support, by contrast, the AEPS had to proceed more slowly, seeking to build the support of line agencies for its programmatic initiatives step-by-step. While the slowness of this process of accumulating material resources has been understandably frustrating to many participants, it may just turn out to be a more solid basis for producing long-term impacts than the more politicized process evident in the case of the BEAR. Players The original hypothesis regarding players in the process of regime formation deals separately with organizations and with individuals. With regard to organizations, the hypothesis suggests that there is no simple shift from one stage of the process to the next. The cases, which generally lend weight to this cautious assessment, also reveal two patterns that are worthy of comment here. To begin with, there is a move in these cases from the dominance of foreign ministries during the stages of agenda formation and negotiation to the emerging role of line agencies located in other ministries during the stage of operationalization. It would be a mistake to overdo this point. The Norwegian Environment Ministry, for example, played a significant part in persuading the Foreign Ministry to take an interest in the Finnish Initiative during the early months of 1989, and the Norwegian Foreign Ministry loomed large in the effort to operationalize the BEAR in the months after January 1993. Yet the increasing diversity of the players involved as the process moved into operationalization, where nonstate actors became increasingly visible, is unmistakable. This may be attributed in part to the fact that most of the environmental NGOs only "discovered" the Arctic during the 1990s. The contrast between the prominent role of these groups in sinking the 1988 Antarctic minerals convention and replacing it with the 1991 environment protocol and their rather subdued role in launching the AEPS in 1991 and the BEAR in 1993 is remarkable.7 In part, it is a consequence of the energy with which the Regional Council (in contrast to the Barents Council) moved to develop the Barents Programme, 6. Mark Monsma, "Winds of Change Within the Barents Organization: An Institutional Analysis of Transnational Regionalization in the North," Working Paper No. 10, Northern Studies Programme, Umea University, 1995. 7. On the case of Antarctica, see Elliott, International Environmental Politics, and Margaret L. Clark, "The Antarctic Environmental Protocol: NGOs in the Protection of Antarctica," in Thomas Princen, et al., Environmental NGOs in World Politics: Linking the Local and the Global, London: Routledge, 1994, 160-85.

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accentuating the role of subnational units of government in this regime in the process. In the case of individual leadership, by contrast, the original hypothesis emphasizes the role of intellectual leadership during agenda formation, entrepreneurial leadership during negotiations, and structural leadership throughout. By and large, the cases support this proposition. But once again, there are some interesting nuances. Intellectual leadership and structural leadership can operate in tandem. The intellectual shift required to move Norwegian policy from its long-standing Atlanticist orientation to the perspective embedded in the BEAR was great, and there is no doubt about the intellectual leadership of Stoltenberg and some of his associates in bringing this change about. Even so, Stoltenberg had to exercise structural leadership, even to the point of reassigning some opponents of the shift, in order to go forward vigorously with the Norwegian Initiative during 1992. Similarly, the same individual can exhibit different types of leadership during the various stages of the process of regime formation. Again, Stoltenberg's activities in connection with the BEAR offer a striking example. Once the idea of the Euro-Arctic was launched, Stoltenberg became a tireless entrepreneur on behalf of this idea. During 1992, he moved to sell the BEAR to key partners like Kozyrev in private discussions, brought important office holders (e.g., leaders of northern counties and oblasts) together to consider the idea, orchestrated efforts on the part of experts to explore it in greater detail, and spoke on behalf of the BEAR in a wide range of forums. After the signing of the Kirkenes Declaration, moreover, Stoltenberg initiated a campaign to move it from paper to practice through the exercise of structural leadership. Thus, he assigned several Foreign Ministry officials to take responsibility for operationalizing the BEAR and to report directly to him, and he provided them with a sufficient budget to get a variety of balls rolling in the Barents Region. Collective-Action Problems While regimes themselves are responses to collective-action problems, the process of creating these institutional arrangements is fraught with collective-action problems of its own, and these problems vary from one stage of the process to another. Just as gridlock or stalemate is the classic danger in connection with negotiation, miscommunication is the standard pitfall during agenda formation, and problems arising from asymmetries in the efforts of individual members are the hazard of operationalization. The evidence drawn from a study of the AEPS and the BEAR is generally compatible with these expectations. In the case of the AEPS, the Finns correctly

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interpreted Gorbachev's Murmansk speech as signaling a genuine interest in Arctic cooperation and moved to highlight the most promising features of Gorbachev's menu while, at the same time, deflecting those elements on his list (e.g., the nuclear-free zone proposals) almost certain to be nonstarters at the international level. But the Americans, still thinking in Cold War terms in 1989 and in any case uncomfortable with the idea of treating the Arctic as a distinct region in policy terms, generally failed to pick up on this maneuver. As a result, the Finns had a difficult time selling their initiative during 1988, and American participation as late as the September 1989 Rovaniemi meeting remained largely perfunctory. For its part, the stage of agenda formation in the case of the BEAR was marked by failures of communication between the Finns, whose thinking focused on the preexisting concept of the North Calotte, and the Norwegians, whose vision of the Euro-Arctic Region—Stoltenberg sometimes called it the Great Calotte to make his point—was considerably more expansive. In the end, Stoltenberg struck a deal with the Russians that made it impossible for the Finns to refuse to join in the Norwegian Initiative. But this maneuver did not convert the Finns with regard to these different visions—a fact that proved costly later in terms of Finnish interest in operationalizing the provisions of the Kirkenes Declaration. The AEPS and the BEAR present an interesting contrast with regard to the issue of gridlock or stalemate during the negotiation stage. Given the nature of institutional bargaining, the participants in the Rovaniemi, Yellowknife, and Kiruna preparatory meetings were not confronted with the classic problem arising from incompatible offers coupled with an unwillingness on the part of key participants to make concessions. Rather, they had to face a situation featuring marked differences between boosters (e.g., Canada, Finland, the Soviet Union) and laggards (e.g., the United States) and still obtain conclusions acceptable to all.8 Although the efforts of the negotiators to overcome this problem were ultimately successful, the outcome was by no means assured until late in the negotiation stage. In the case of the BEAR, by contrast, no such collective-action problems surfaced during the negotiation stage. This is largely attributable to the momentum arising from Stoltenberg's leadership, the enlistment of Kozyrev as a backer of the Norwegian Initiative, and the fact that the Finns and others were left at the end of the day with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. The operationalization stage presents yet another face with regard to collective-action problems. Asymmetries among members during this 8. Sprinz and Vaahtoranta, "The Interest-Based Explanation of International Environmental Policy."

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stage are bad enough when they reflect differences in the capacity of individual actors to take action. Still, such problems can be addressed, at least in part, through measures involving technical assistance, technology transfers, and innovative financing mechanisms. Efforts to assist Russia with regard to both the AEPS and the BEAR illustrate this possibility. More difficult problems arise when asymmetries result from a lack of commitment or political will than when they are caused by a lack of capacity. The difficulty in getting Finland and Sweden to match Norwegian funding for Barents Region projects became a significant point of contention in the effort to operationalize the BEAR. An even more dramatic case arose from the unwillingness of the United States even to match the contributions of smaller members to programs like the AMAP and CAFF, much less to make contributions commensurate with its ability to pay. Context Context in connection with the formation of international regimes refers to politically significant events that are exogenous to the formation process but that have consequences for the efforts of the parties to reach agreement on the provisions of institutional arrangements. The hypothesis suggests that broad changes in the political environment will affect agenda formation, more specific exogenous events will influence negotiations, and domestic developments will loom large during the stage of operationalization. For the most part, this is exactly what happened in the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR. Both initiatives were made possible by the profound changes in the international political order associated with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.9 In the case of the AEPS, it took some time for these developments to sink in, a fact that clearly slowed down the stage of agenda formation. While the Finns with their intimate knowledge of Soviet behavior were quick to grasp the significance of Gorbachev's Murmansk Initiative, they found it difficult to persuade others, especially the Americans, that the change in the overarching political environment was real and unlikely to be reversed. For its part, the debate within the Norwegian Foreign Ministry that preceded the launching of the Norwegian Initiative was a direct response to changes in the overarching political environment. This debate pitted the Atlanticists who were unconvinced by the case for change against a growing faction concerned with the changing political architecture of Europe and anxious to begin adjusting to the new situation. Although these broader changes 9. See also Young, Arctic Politics, introduction.

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certainly did not dictate an effort to move toward cooperation in the Barents Region, it is fair to say that these changes constituted a necessary condition for the Norwegian Initiative to arise. The story of the negotiation stage in the two cases involves more specific contextual developments that influenced but ultimately failed to derail progress toward the formation of new regimes. The crumbling of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the Persian Gulf crisis which erupted in August 1990 and turned violent in January 1991 did not slow down the process of crafting the Rovaniemi Declaration, even though these events certainly diverted the attention of many parties from northern issues. Similarly, the emergence of the Russian Federation as the successor state to the Soviet Union in the Arctic during the early months of 1992 did not impede Stoltenberg's efforts during the winter and spring to forge a link with Russia as a precondition for launching the negotiation stage in the process of forming the BEAR. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the effects of shifts in domestic political conditions during the stage of operationalization. There can be no doubt, for example, that a growing concern about deficit spending in the United States hampered the efforts of agencies like the EPA and the NOAA to operationalize the AMAP, much less other elements of the AEPS Action Plan. Even more dramatic is the case of Russia with regard to the BEAR. Both the political confrontation that culminated with Boris Yeltsin's dismissal of the Russian Parliament in October 1993 and the growing economic crisis within Russia made it difficult for the Russians to follow up on the Kirkenes Declaration with meaningful commitments of resources. At the same time, 1993 witnessed a growing interest on the part of Finland and Sweden in developments pertaining to the Baltic Region in contrast to the Barents Region. Under the circumstances, it is accurate to say that domestic developments having nothing to do with the BEAR per se presented growing obstacles during the operationalization stage to the realization of the commitments made at Kirkenes in January 1993. Tactics The hypothesis regarding tactics suggests that the traditional concern of the bargaining literature with threats, promises, and so forth is relevant primarily to the negotiation stage of regime formation and that tactical activities focus on efforts to develop an authoritative characterization of the problem during agenda formation and on matters of administrative and bureaucratic politics during operationalization. Here again, the evidence from the cases indicates that this hypothesis has merit but with some

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intriguing twists that were not apparent at the outset. The traditional concern with threats, promises, and various kinds of committal tactics did not become dominant in forming the AEPS and the BEAR, even during the stage of negotiation. This is not to say that such tactics were altogether absent. It is plausible to read the show of determination on the part of the boosters (e.g., Canada, Finland, the Soviet Union) during late 1989 and early 1990 to go forward with some form of international cooperation focused on Arctic environmental issues as a means of putting pressure on laggards like the United States to choose between joining and running the risk of public embarrassment that would follow an open refusal to participate. Similarly, it seems clear that Stoltenberg made some significant promises to the Russians in conjunction with his effort to forge a bond between Norway and Russia and, in the process, to prepare the way for launching the negotiation stage in the case of the BEAR. But the record of these cases does not yield evidence of the sort of preoccupation with bargaining tactics that one might expect from a reading of the seminal works of Thomas Schelling and those who have followed in his footsteps.10 The explanation for this state of affairs is not hard to locate. Whereas a preoccupation with classic bargaining tactics is to be expected under conditions of distributive bargaining or of life on the Pareto frontier, the mixed-motive negotiations characteristic of efforts to form regimes not only provide the parties with incentives to think in integrative terms but also create an environment in which the use of hardball tactics is likely to prove counterproductive.11 The tactics of the agenda formation and operationalization stages present interesting contrasts. As the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR suggest, agenda formation often involves both struggles internal to the governments of individual participants and the expenditure of considerable energy forming transnational alliances that link like-minded actors located within different governments. In the case of Norway, for example, the Environment Ministry initially took a much more positive view of the Finnish Initiative than the Foreign Ministry, and the Foreign Ministry itself became an arena for competition among supporters of divergent views in connection with the emergence of the Norwegian Initiative. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that Rajakoski's role during the agenda formation stage of the AEPS was to circulate around national capitals in search of agencies or individuals willing to take an interest in the Finnish Initiative and champion it within their own policymaking forums. Nor is it difficult to understand why Stoltenberg arranged several seminars and commissioned a number of 10. Schelling, Strategy of Conflict. 11. The classic study of integrative bargaining is Richard Walton and Robert B. McKersie, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965.

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background papers as a means of disseminating the idea of the Barents Region among opinion leaders both inside and outside key governments.12 By contrast, the tactics of the operationalization stage in cases like the AEPS and the BEAR, which rest on ministerial declarations not requiring ratification, center on the dynamics of administrative, bureaucratic and budgetary politics. While the details differ from country to country, the general character of the resultant interactions is familiar. They feature efforts on the part of line agencies to capture (or, in some cases, to shun) a piece of the action, to make use of new responsibilities to justify requests for additional resources, and to participate in interagency coordination processes on terms favorable to themselves.13 Given their programmatic orientation, it will come as no surprise that tactical maneuvers involving the search for funds to carry out the AMAP mandate or to implement various projects inscribed in the Barents Programme constitute a particularly salient feature of the operationalization stage in the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR.14 Design Perspectives The point of this hypothesis is that participants adopt different perspectives on matters of institutional design as the focus of attention shifts from one stage of regime formation to another. Whereas agenda formation is a time for focusing on the big picture without much attention to detail, the negotiation stage stimulates a concern for the content of specific provisions to be included in a single negotiating text. The stage of operationalization, by contrast, is characterized by fragmentation with insufficient attention directed toward the creation of international administrative arrangements and a wide variety of approaches adopted at the domestic level by individual regime members. By and large, the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR conform to these expectations. Agenda formation in the case of the BEAR, in particular, centered on the effort to work out a generative vision of the Barents Region.15 This is attributable to the need to overcome opposition within the Norwegian Foreign Ministry itself, to invent a region that had little basis in existing activities on the ground, and to differentiate the idea of the Barents Region from the preexisting concept of the North Calotte. 12. A number of these papers were prepared by researchers at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo. See the issue of the Institute's journal devoted to this work: International Challenges 12(4): 1992. 13. For a classic study of these processes within the American political system, see Pressman and Wildavsky, Implementation. 14. Monsma, "Winds of Change Within the Barents Organization." 15. Tunander, "Inventing the Barents Region."

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In the case of the AEPS, on the other hand, the effort to devise a generative vision during the stage of agenda formation was hampered both by diverging perspectives regarding the nature of the underlying theme and by the relatively low level in the political hierarchy at which discussions took place. Even so, this case conforms to the expectations associated with the hypothesis in that the parties framed their discussions in general terms and refrained from initiating an effort to spell out specific provisions of the regime itself during the stage of agenda formation. The transition from agenda formation to negotiation brought a clear shift in the design perspectives of those involved in forming the AEPS and the BEAR. Given the character of the negotiation stage, with its emphasis on the development of a unified text that can serve as the basis of an explicit agreement, such a shift is almost inevitable. Just as the parties emphasize the big picture in connection with the effort to frame the issue during the stage of agenda formation, they move toward a design perspective emphasizing the contents of institutional blueprints when it comes to the development of a negotiating text. As the cases make clear, however, this shift is not as simple or as clear-cut as the original hypothesis suggests. In the case of the AEPS, the documents signed in Rovaniemi on 14 June 1991 left many issues of institutional design to be worked out during the stage of operationalization. In the process of shepherding through the BEAR, Stoltenberg deliberately held back the shift from thinking about the big picture to working on the specific text of an agreement in order to buy additional time for familiarizing various parties with the novel idea of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region. As a result, the move toward formulating the substantive provisions of an agreement came with a rush during October 1992, scarcely three months before the signing of the Kirkenes Declaration in January 1993. With respect to design perspectives during the stage of operationalization, the evidence from the cases again suggests several additional observations. Designing international administrative mechanisms for regimes (e.g., the AMAP, CAFF, the Barents Secretariat) is a process that tends to fall through the cracks. It requires an attention to detail that is seldom feasible in connection with international negotiations. Yet the parties often fail to establish any well-defined procedure capable of handling this aspect of the transition from paper to practice.16 The result is an ad hoc process 16. This is particularly true of relatively small-scale regimes. In the case of the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, by contrast, the United Nations established a Preparatory Committee to handle transitional issues. Similarly, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee continued to meet to handle transitional issues in the case of the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change.

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that is often slow and that can easily yield unsatisfactory results. When it comes to operationalization at the domestic level, variations in the political structures and policy cultures of regime members guarantee that a wide range of design perspectives will come into play, even in cases where each member is subject to the same obligations at the international level. Generalizing the Findings To what extent are the findings of this study regarding the political dynamics of regime formation generalizable to the larger universe of cases involving the creation of international institutions? The answer to this question depends on the extent to which the AEPS and the BEAR exhibit features that set them apart from other regimes with regard to the process of regime formation and therefore raise questions about the degree to which their creation stories can be treated as representative of the process of regime formation in general. Several features of these cases are worth considering in these terms. Both the AEPS and the BEAR involve institutionalized activities that are largely programmatic, rather than regulative or procedural, in nature. These regimes focus on the development of joint projects in contrast to the articulation of common rules or procedures for arriving at collective choices. Both arrangements rest on soft law agreements in the form of ministerial declarations, in contrast to legally binding treaties or conventions. Each of these cases emphasizes the role of environmental concerns, seeking in the process to sidestep traditional problems of security. What is more, both the AEPS and the BEAR are simple cases in the sense that it is relatively easy in thinking about each of them to draw a distinction between an initial period of regime formation and a subsequent period of regime operation. The following discussion takes up each of these features in turn and explores their implications for our understanding of the political dynamics of regime formation. Although many real-world regimes constitute mixed types, the differences between programmatic activities and regulative or procedural activities are significant. Whereas programmatic regimes concentrate on devising joint projects (e.g., the AMAP under the AEPS, or the various projects included in the Barents Programme under the BEAR) and on generating the funding needed to carry them out, regulative arrangements focus on the promulgation of behavioral prescriptions, and procedural arrangements center on the development of decisionmaking processes to handle recurrent choices (e.g., setting annual quotas for the harvesting of renewable resources). It is therefore reasonable to expect the day-to-day operations of such arrangements to differ substantially from one another.

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But these operational differences do not entail any fundamental divergences with regard to the process of regime formation. Both agenda formation and the negotiation of explicit agreements setting forth the terms of institutional arrangements are common to all three types of institutions. To the extent that there is a difference that is relevant to regime formation, it is likely to come during the stage of operationalization. For instance, while regulative and procedural arrangements give rise to a persistent concern with compliance, programmatic arrangements lead to an emphasis on the design of joint projects and the difficulty of finding funds to carry them out. These activities are apt to require the development of different mechanisms at the international level, and they typically lead to the allocation of responsibility to different governmental agencies at the domestic level. In terms of regime formation, the differences between soft law arrangements and hard law arrangements are also most notable during the stage of operationalization. Whereas ministerial declarations, such as those adopted at Rovaniemi in June 1991 and at Kirkenes in January 1993, are executive agreements that can make the transition from paper to practice in the absence of legislative approval, legally binding instruments like conventions and treaties generally require ratification and often involve the passage of implementing legislation. What this means is that legislative politics in contrast to administrative and bureaucratic politics will loom larger in connection with hard law arrangements than soft law arrangements. But it is easy to overdo the importance of this distinction. Although the distinction is admittedly an important one in the case of the United States, the political significance of the gap between executive agreements and conventions or treaties is considerably smaller in many other political systems where governments can count on commanding a parliamentary majority in support of their initiatives. Even in the American system, the facts that Congress controls the appropriation of funds needed to operationalize international commitments and that Congressional committees have oversight authority over the activities of line agencies make it hazardous for the executive to proceed very far with soft law arrangements in the face of organized legislative opposition. With regard to agenda formation and negotiation, on the other hand, the differences between hard law arrangements and soft law arrangements are minimal. In either case, an issue must rise on the international political agenda to the point where it justifies the expenditure of political capital required to conduct negotiations in order to get past the stage of agenda formation. In both cases, moreover, the negotiation process turns on the development and refinement of negotiating texts that can pro-

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vide a basis for the signing of explicit agreements setting forth the terms of reference for ongoing cooperative activities. The matter of differences between environmental issues and other issue areas requires further clarification. Although it is true that the AEPS is framed as an agreement about environmental protection, much of the discussion that took place during the formation process was couched in terms of broader concerns about sustainable development.17 For its part, the BEAR is far more than an environmental arrangement, even though it is true that environmental concerns played a significant role in launching this regime.18 As the prominence of considerations dealing with the emerging political architecture of central and northern Europe in this case suggests, there is a real sense in which the BEAR deals with concerns that are geopolitical in nature. Beyond this, it would be a mistake to overemphasize functional distinctions in thinking about the political dynamics of regime formation. There are good reasons to conclude that other analytic distinctions (e.g., problem type, number of important players) are more important than functional scope in shaping the processes involved in regime formation. Still, it may well be true that regimes dealing with geopolitical concerns or other matters traditionally regarded as "high" politics are apt to be handled at higher levels in the political hierarchy than regimes dealing with environmental matters. Thus, the BEAR captured the attention of foreign ministers who gathered in Kirkenes to sign the January 1993 declaration and who now participate in annual meetings of the Barents Council. The AEPS, by contrast, has been handled by mid-level officials in the foreign ministries, and the AEPS ministerial meetings have been left largely to environment ministers and their subordinates. Whatever the merits of this distinction, the question remains whether it has important consequences for the political dynamics of regime formation. Some consequences have been addressed in the preceding chapters and are worth noting again in this connection. There is nothing in the creation story of the AEPS to match the leadership provided by Stoltenberg in the case of the BEAR, for instance, and it is undoubtedly true that the political importance attached to the BEAR explains the willingness of the Norwegian government to allocate substantial funds to the Foreign Ministry during 1993-94 to be used to get the Barents Programme under

17. This is certainly attributable in part to the influence of the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future. 18. For an account that emphasizes the role of environmental considerations, see Stokke, "Environmental Cooperation."

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way. Even so, these observations do not add up to a conclusion that there are fundamental differences between regime formation in the case of environmental issues and regime formation in connection with other issues. The distinction between simple cases and complex cases, on the other hand, may turn out to be of greater significance. In simple cases, like the AEPS and the BEAR, there is a linear progression from regime formation to the day-to-day operation of these institutional arrangements. When we turn to complex cases where regime formation is an ongoing process that occurs alongside implementation and operation, political dynamics may take on additional dimensions. Complex cases—like the European longrange air pollution regime and the ozone protection regime—involve, at one and the same time, the day-to-day operation of existing components and the development of new components (e.g., the sulfur protocols in the case of LRTAP or the London and Copenhagen amendments in the case of stratospheric ozone).19 Clearly, this opens up the possibility of political dynamics in which there is an interplay between the politics of day-to-day operation and the politics of ongoing regime formation that does not occur in simple cases. Without doubt, the performance of the existing LRTAP Regime has helped propel efforts to work out the terms of each new protocol, and a similar dynamic has driven efforts to formulate amendments to the Montreal Protocol on ozone depletion. My sense, at this stage, is that although the new dimensions arising in these complex cases are significant additions to the political dynamics characteristic of regime formation in simple cases, they do not dramatically alter the essential nature of the process. But this is a matter that is certainly worthy of attention in future studies of regime formation. It would be inappropriate to claim too much on the basis of in-depth studies of only two cases. Yet I now believe that the thesis of this book regarding the distinctive features of the political dynamics of agenda formation, negotiation, and operationalization does tap important differences among distinct stages in the overall process of regime formation. As the preceding paragraphs suggest, there are several features of the AEPS and the BEAR that set them apart from other members of the larger universe of cases. Surely, there is a need for additional studies to explore the significance of these differences. For the moment, however, it seems fair to conclude that the central thesis of this study remains intact following its initial encounter with empirical evidence. 19. Levy, "European Acid Rain," 75-132; and Parson, "Protecting the Ozone Layer," 27-74.

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Identifying Implications for Other Theories Prior research on regime formation has been dominated by debates among exponents of power, interests, ideas, or contextual forces as the key to understanding both successes and failures in efforts to create international institutions and the substantive character of those regimes that do get under way.20 Analysts who stress the role of power see the institutional landscape as a relatively straightforward reflection of the underlying configuration of power in international society. Those who favor explanations emphasizing interests focus on interactive decisionmaking among self-interested actors and direct attention to (explicit or tacit) bargaining processes among these actors. Advocates of the importance of ideas look to cognitive factors and stress the roles of consensual knowledge and of individuals or groups who become carriers of such knowledge. For their part, observers who look to contextual factors for explanations tend to treat regime formation as a surficial phenomenon carried along by broader currents of human affairs that are energized by some combination of material forces (e.g., changes in prevailing modes of production) and ideational forces (e.g., broad changes in human values or beliefs). It is not the purpose of this study to reconcile these divergent perspectives on the formation of international institutions. Even so, the preceding account of the political dynamics of the three stages of regime formation does yield some insights relating to this larger debate that are worth spelling out and drawing together here. The creation stories of the AEPS and the BEAR raise searching questions about conventional arguments concerning the impact of power in the formation of international regimes. The role of power in the material sense in these cases is elusive. The sole remaining superpower, the United States, is an Arctic state. Yet it not only failed to become a booster in the effort to create the AEPS but it also emerged as the principal laggard in this case of regime formation. In fact, the other participants found themselves seeking ways to exert pressure on the United States to become a signatory to the Rovaniemi Declaration, and the United States did not become a leader in operationalizing the AEPS either internationally or domestically in the period following the signing of the declaration. It certainly would be inaccurate to interpret Finland's activities in championing the AEPS during the stage of agenda formation as an exercise of power, even in the issue-specific sense. And the growing role of the Nordic countries in this case, with the emergence of Sweden as a prominent player and the conversion of Norway 20. Haggard and Simmons, "Theories of International Regimes," 491-517; and Rittberger, et al., "Interests-Power-Knowledge."

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to the role of active supporter during the negotiation stage, is better understood as an exercise in interest-based entrepreneurship than as an effort to bring power to bear to achieve high-priority goals. The case of the BEAR offers another angle on the role of power in the material sense. It is undeniable that Norway made use of its material resources to press for rapid progress in developing the Kirkenes Declaration and in putting its provisions into practice during the stage of operationalization. Norway is a wealthy country, and it was able to deploy material resources to good advantage in this case, especially in making the Norwegian Initiative attractive to the Russians. In this connection, some Finnish participants have spoken, only half jokingly, of the hegemonic behavior of Norway in replacing the idea of the North Calotte with the more encompassing idea of the Barents Region. Still, there is no objective basis for treating Norway as a hegemon in this case, even in the issue-specific sense.21 Moreover, there is a good argument to be made for the proposition that the weakness of Russia in material terms during 1992-93 actually facilitated progress toward creating the BEAR by alleviating traditional Norwegian fears of asymmetrical cooperation with its neighbor to the East and by making Russia particularly interested in the prospects of obtaining technological and financial assistance from its neighbors to the West. Where does this leave us with regard to our understanding of the role of power in the process of regime formation? These cases do not license the conclusion that power in the material sense is irrelevant. But they do suggest a number of qualifications regarding power that are worth spelling out explicitly. The creation stories of the AEPS and the BEAR add to the growing realization that the presence of a dominant actor is not necessary to the achievement of success in regime formation. The cases of the AEPS and especially the BEAR suggest that intensity of interest on the part of key participants is more important than the possession of a great deal of power in the material sense when it comes to promoting the process of regime formation. As the circumstances of Russia in connection with the BEAR suggest, moreover, there are times when the weakness of a key actor in material terms can actually serve to enhance the prospects for success in regime formation. There is clearly a link between the role of ideas and the exercise of power in the context of regime formation. In the case of the BEAR, the fact that Stoltenberg had staked so much on the idea of the Barents Region domestically as well as internationally gave him a compelling reason to commit material resources to this project, especially dur21. Although Norway is a wealthy country with outstanding natural resources, it has the smallest population of the four principal members of the BEAR.

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ing the period of operationalization following the signing of the Kirkenes Declaration. As these cases make clear, the availability of material resources in the form of the funds needed to get under way or to move incipient regimes from paper to practice is essential to success in the overall process of regime formation. Although this requirement is particularly important in connection with programmatic regimes that call for the launching of joint projects (e.g., the AMAP in the case of the AEPS), reasonable levels of funding are clearly important with respect to other types of regimes as well. Turning now to interest-based arguments, the creation stories of the AEPS and the BEAR suggest the following observations. Both cases featured processes in which actors possessing well-defined interests at the outset engaged in interactive efforts to promote their (broadly compatible but not necessarily common) interests through the initiation of cooperative ventures. In this sense, these stories do not lend much support to the constitutive or constructivist arguments of those who have participated in the agent/structure debate.22 Yet this is not the whole story regarding the role of interests in the process of regime formation. To begin with, there may well be a distinction in these terms between the creation of issue-specific arrangements, like the AEPS and the BEAR, and the establishment or reconstitution of broader arrangements, like the world trade system. Thus, the fact that preexisting interests are prominent in the process of forming these issue-specific regimes should not lead us to dismiss constructivist arguments regarding broader or more generic institutional developments. Even more to the point is the observation that interests are typically couched in general terms that leave a great deal of discretion to those who have the authority to interpret them and to make the connections between broadly stated interests and policy preferences relevant to specific cases. Finland's interests during the late 1980s in facilitating cooperative relations between the Soviet Union and the West and in protecting the forests of northern Fennoscandia, for instance, are perfectly clear. But there is nothing in these interests that dictated the specific form of the Finnish Initiative as it took shape during 1988 and the early months of 1989. Even more dramatic is the case of Norway with regard to the BEAR. While there is nothing ambiguous about Norway's interest in devising a new role for northern Europe to match the shifting political architecture of central and eastern Europe during the 1990s, this interest certainly did not dictate 22. For a prominent attack on interest-based arguments, see Jiirgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, Boston: Beacon, 1972. Among those who have raised these issues in recent literature on international institutions is Wendt, "Anarchy is What States Make of It."

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the vision of the Barents Region that became the basis of the Norwegian Initiative of 1992.23 What all this suggests, then, is that the links between interests and policy preferences regarding specific issues are more complex than is often assumed and that these links deserve more careful scrutiny in future studies of regime formation. The creation stories of the AEPS and the BEAR also remind us that governments are complex organizations and that the interests of individual units of government need not be compatible with one another, much less congruent with some sense of "national" interest. Illustrations of this point abound in the cases studied here. In Norway, the Environment Ministry took a stronger interest in the Finnish Initiative than the Foreign Ministry, especially during the stage of agenda formation. In the United States, a number of line agencies expressed concern that the State Department might make commitments with regard to the AEPS that individual agencies would be unable to fulfill due to a lack of funding. In Russia, the regional governments located in Murmansk, Archangel, and Petrozavodsk expressed a much stronger interest in the BEAR than the national government in Moscow. Moreover, the earlier relationship between the Foreign Ministry and the Environment Ministry in Norway was reversed, with the Foreign Ministry exhibiting the stronger interest in regime formation and taking the lead in operationalizing the BEAR as well as in negotiating the terms of the Kirkenes Declaration. There is nothing peculiar about these examples of variance in the interests of different agencies or units of government within the same political system. But it does remind us that treating the members of international regimes as unitary actors is a risky business and that the concept of two-level games is one that has much to offer in efforts to understand regime formation as well as other international activities.24 With regard to the role of ideas, the initial findings from these case studies are somewhat negative. It would be a stretch to argue that consensual knowledge became an important factor in these cases or that epistemic communities played a major role in the formation of the AEPS or the BEAR. The Norwegian concept of the Barents Region was greeted with skepticism in a number of quarters, and the logic behind the Finnish Initiative was not grasped by many, including most American policymakers. Nor is there much evidence of the operation of an epistemic community or a transnational group possessing both a common understanding of the problem and a shared prescription for its solution in either of these cases. Arguably, this is no cause for surprise in the case of the BEAR, given 23. For a range of perspectives on this issue, see Stokke and Tunander, eds., The Barents Region. 24. See Evans, Jacobson, and Putnam, eds., Double-Edged Diplomacy.

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that the Norwegian Initiative encompassed a broad spectrum of substantive concerns and that the literature on epistemic communities deals primarily with initiatives limited to environmental issues. But on this account, the absence of an epistemic community in the case of the AEPS becomes even more puzzling. Perhaps the absence can be explained in this case in terms of the politicization of the Arctic during the Cold War and the relative lack of interest in the Arctic on the part of environmental NGOs prior to the 1990s. If this is true, we should expect to encounter evidence of the emergence of one or more epistemic communities concerned with Arctic issues (e.g., the recent drive to create the Arctic Council) during the period since 1991. Although there are some indications that this has occurred, the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR make it clear that neither the presence of consensual knowledge nor the active participation of an epistemic community is necessary for the achievement of success in the process of regime formation at the international level. Even so, this should not be taken to mean that cognitive factors are unimportant with regard to the process of regime formation. The evidence from the AEPS and the BEAR suggests that ideas are particularly important when it comes to providing a general framework or a generative vision within which regime formation can proceed and establishing a discourse in terms of which to discuss progress in the direction of regime formation. Linking Arctic environmental concerns with a focus on specific pollutants and with the idea of critical loads emerging from the experience with LRTAP in Europe, for example, clearly helped to structure the thinking reflected in the Rovaniemi Declaration and especially in the Action Plan set forth in the accompanying strategy document. In this sense, it is probably accurate to treat the AEPS not only as a Finnish initiative in political terms but also as a European Arctic initiative, in contrast to a North American or Russian initiative, in cognitive terms. Somewhat similar comments are in order regarding the link between the emerging European concepts of subsidiarity and a Europe of Regions and the vision of the Barents Region articulated in the Norwegian Initiative.25 The point of these observations is not to debate whether the influence of the LRTAP experience on the process of forming the AEPS or the impact of the idea of a Europe of Regions on the process of establishing the BEAR was generally a good thing or a bad thing. Rather, the important point is to understand that participants in processes of regime formation have a pressing need for orienting perspectives and that such perspectives are generally in short supply. Such phenomena fall short of what most of those who 25. Veggeland, "The Barents Region as a European Frontier Region."

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speak of consensual knowledge have in mind, and the cases of the AEPS and the BEAR suggest that generative visions are just as likely to be promoted by a few key players (e.g., Stoltenberg and his associates in the case of the BEAR) as by an epistemic community. But the role of such frameworks certainly deserves consideration under the rubric of cognitive factors. Finally, there is the matter of context. The evidence from the AEPS and the BEAR highlights the role of macro-level developments of a contextual nature both in giving rise to problems of the sort that regimes are designed to solve or alleviate and in generating opportunities to break out of preexisting patterns of behavior. While the Finnish Initiative is understandable at one level as a specific response to the initiatives outlined in Gorbachev's October 1987 Murmansk speech, it is also fair to say that the whole idea of pursuing multilateral cooperation in the Arctic would have been a nonstarter in the absence of the winding down of the Cold War. Similarly, there would have been no need for the Norwegian Initiative without the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting changes in the political architecture of central and eastern Europe in the early 1990s. In a broad sense, it is surely accurate to interpret the process of regime formation as a response to more general developments in the political landscape. In addition, the experiences of the AEPS and the BEAR make it clear that the occurrence of microlevel exogenous shocks (e.g., the public release of information on the occurrence of the Antarctic ozone hole in the case of ozone depletion) is not a necessary condition for the achievement of success in the process of regime formation.26 This is not to deny the significance of such contextual factors when they do occur. The evidence regarding the significance of the ozone hole in the case of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, for example, is highly persuasive.27 But it is certainly worth knowing from a policy perspective as well as from a scholarly point of view that success in forming international regimes is perfectly possible even in the absence of some sort of exogenous shock. Setting the Research Agenda This study of the political dynamics of regime formation raises a host of new questions that deserve systematic attention on the part of those seeking to understand the process through which international institutions 26. For a discussion of the role of exogenous shocks in institutional bargaining, see Young, International Governance, chap. 4. 27. See Litfin, Ozone Discourses. For a counterargument, which strikes me as less persuasive, see Richard E. Benedick, Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.

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come into being. The following paragraphs identify the most interesting of these questions, framing them as suitable topics for future investigation. The discussion begins with a series of issues specific to the individual stages of regime formation, then moves on to several topics relevant to all three stages of regime formation. The creation stories of the AEPS and the BEAR suggest that there is a need to devote much more attention to the political dynamic of agenda formation. It is not difficult to understand why those interested in regime formation have focused in the past on the negotiation stage of the overall process. However, much can be gained by increasing our understanding of the stage of agenda formation. How do problems make their way onto the international political agenda in the first place, and what factors determine whether they rise to the point where parties are willing to commit the resources needed to make the transition from agenda formation to the stage of negotiation? What is the nature of the process through which problems get framed for consideration at the international level, and what forces come into play in shaping the discourse in terms of which problems are discussed during the process of regime formation? Realists and neorealists will undoubtedly seek to answer these questions by arguing that the dynamic of agenda formation reflects the interests or the preferences of the most powerful states involved in any given issue area. But the evidence from the AEPS and the BEAR does not lend much support to this view. It is difficult, for example, to make the case that Norway was able to dominate the stage of agenda formation in the case of the BEAR because of the superiority of its material resources. The stories set forth in Chapter 3 suggest that the process through which a discourse crystallizes around a problem on the international political agenda exhibits a life of its own that is hard to control through the exercise of power in the material sense.28 But we need to learn much more about this process before we can evaluate the significance of the forces at work with any confidence. Although the negotiation stage has received more attention on the part of those who study regimes than the agenda formation and operationalization stages, there remains ample scope for additional research on institutional bargaining. A particularly interesting topic, in this connection, concerns the relative weight of problem structure and process as determinants of the outcomes of the negotiation stage. Two observations relating to this issue arise from a study of the AEPS and the BEAR. The debate about problem structure and process resembles the familiar nature/nurture 28. For some comparative observations about the cases of stratospheric ozone and climate change, see Ian H. Rowlands, The Politics of Global Atmospheric Change, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995, esp. chaps. 2-4.

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debate regarding the physical and the psychological development of individuals throughout the life cycle. Both sets of forces play important roles; there are often complex interactions between them, and efforts to determine which is more important lead only to sterile debates. The task before us in the study of regime formation, then, is to explore the relative contributions of problem structure and process in explaining the outcomes of regime formation and to study the interactions between these forces. To pursue this research agenda, the cases studied here suggest that we will also need to devise ways to characterize and classify problem structures that go beyond the benign/malign distinction of the Oslo group and the typology of conflicts of the Tubingen group.29 A major challenge facing those engaged in regime analysis is to devise a way of thinking about problem structure that draws on preexisting efforts in this area and yet provides us with a new approach to this phenomenon that is both richer than its predecessors and suitable for use in empirical studies of actual cases of regime formation. Coming to the stage of operationalization, two sets of issues emerge as worthy of greater attention. There is, in the first instance, a need to devote more thought to understanding the process of establishing the international mechanisms needed to move regimes from paper to practice and to administer them on a day-to-day basis. Because this issue lies at the interface between studies dealing with regime formation and studies focusing on implementation, it has often fallen through the cracks. Some large-scale regimes built around legally binding conventions or treaties feature the creation of preparatory mechanisms intended to get the ball rolling with regard to the transition from paper to practice even before the relevant convention or treaty enters into force. Examples like the 1982 law of the sea convention and the 1992 climate change convention come to mind in this context.30 But these transitional issues are often ignored in connection with lesser arrangements, like the AEPS and the BEAR. As a result, the establishment of international mechanisms commonly becomes an ad hoc process in which developments are driven by the willingness of individual members to volunteer resources (e.g., Norway in the case of the AMAP). There is a pronounced tendency to reinvent the wheel in each succeeding case, and lengthy delays are common.31 Under the circum29. See Wettestad, "'Nuts and Bolts for Environmental Negotiators'"; and Rittberger and Ziirn, "Regime Theory," 165-83. 30. On the case of climate change, see Victor and Salt, "From Rio to Berlin," 6-15 and 25-32. 31. The case of AMAP, which was simple by comparison with many other cases, is instructive in these terms. Despite the best of intentions, it took fifteen months from the signing of the Rovaniemi Declaration in June 1991 to recruit an executive secretary and get the AMAP Secretariat up and running in Oslo.

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stances, not only do we need to improve our understanding of the process of international operationalization, but we must devise ways to deal with this process more effectively and efficiently—a point to which I return in the following section dealing with implications for practitioners. There is a need as well to learn more about the process of domestic operationalization and the effects of the heterogeneity of political structures and policy cultures on this aspect of regime formation. The study of domestic operationalization opens up issues relating to both interagency coordination within the executive branch of government and, at least in some cases, interactions between the executive and legislative branches of government. The existing literature on this subject tends to focus on the American case—a practice that is understandable given the history of regime analysis but unfortunate in light of the rather unusual political system in place in the United States.32 What is needed in this connection is a comparative study of the ways in which domestic operationalization is handled within the political systems of the individual members of international regimes, like the AEPS and the BEAR.33 In almost every case, individual regime members face problems in working out relations between their foreign ministries and line agencies in this realm and in devising interagency procedures to facilitate efforts to arrive at appropriate divisions of labor among the various line agencies responsible for operating any given regime. The evidence from the creation stories of the AEPS and the BEAR suggests that these are difficult tasks in every political system, although not necessarily for the same reasons. Many of the Arctic countries, including Canada, Russia, the United States, and several of the Nordic states, have experienced disappointments in their efforts to create interagency commissions, committees, or working groups to coordinate the efforts of the various agencies responsible for handling aspects of the same regimes. What is more, there is a good deal of confusion about similarities and differences among the procedures the eight Arctic states employ in this realm. In the end, it will undoubtedly be necessary to revamp the hodgepodge of mechanisms that have emerged to handle the domestic implementation of programmatic regimes like the AEPS and the BEAR. At 32. For a case in point, see Osherenko and Young, Age of the Arctic, chap. 8. 33. Students of international regimes have recently begin to focus on the issues of domesticating international commitments. For some preliminary reports on this line of inquiry, see Kenneth Hanf and Arild Underdal, "Domesticating International Commitments: Linking National and International Decision-Making," in Arild Underdal, ed., The International Politics of Environmental Management, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995, 1-20; Harold K. Jacobson and Edith Brown Weiss, "Strengthening Compliance with International Accords: Preliminary Observations from a Collaborative Project," Global Governance 1 (1995): 119-48; and Kal Raustiala, "The Domestication of International Commitments," IIASA Working Paper WP-95-115, 1995.

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this point, however, it would help simply to make a greater effort to understand the differences among current practices in this area. Several concerns that cut across the stages of regime formation are also ripe for further investigation at this time. First, we need to improve our understanding of the nexus between interests and policy preferences among actors participating in regime formation. Although more comprehensive efforts to (re)structure international institutions (e.g., the creation of the United Nations System in the aftermath of World War II) may differ in this regard, most participants in the formation of more limited, issue-specific arrangements—like the AEPS and the BEAR—enter the process with a clear sense both of their own identity and of the interests that flow from it.34 It seems undeniable, for instance, that the Finnish Initiative arose from Finland's interests in facilitating East-West cooperation and in protecting the ecosystems of the northern part of the country. Much the same can be said of Norway's interests in responding to the changing configuration of political forces in Europe, building positive relations with Russia, and protecting the environment of northern Fennoscandia as a basis for the launching of the BEAR. But this is not the whole story with regard to the nexus between interests and policy preferences. There is, in most situations, considerable maneuvering room in the transition from interests defined rather generally to the articulation of policy preferences with regard to specific issues; much of the activity in political arenas involves debates about the relative merits of different policies among those who share a common view of the interests of the actors they represent. The debate between the Foreign Ministry and the Environment Ministry in Norway about how to respond to the Finnish Initiative in 1988-89, for example, was not fundamentally a disagreement about Norway's interest in protecting the environment in the high latitudes. Much the same can be said about the debate within the Norwegian Foreign Ministry prior to the launching of the BEAR as an initiative designed to promote Norway's interests in northern Europe. This suggests there is considerable room for additional research relating to the links between interests and policy preferences, even in cases where issue-specific regimes do not alter the interests, much less the identities, of their members in any substantial way. The role of nonstate actors is another issue that cuts across the stages of regime formation and that is in need of more sustained analysis.35 In forming the AEPS and the BEAR, the NGOs (e.g., the environmental groups) 34. For a more subjectivist account of the relationship between identities and interests, see Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, World of Our Making, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989. 35. See Thomas Princen, et al., Environmental NGOs in World Politics.

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maintained a relatively low profile, gradually increasing their interest in the process as it shifted from the negotiation stage to the stage of operationalization. Does the low profile of the NGOs in these cases reflect an inability on the part of these actors to find ways to intervene effectively in the process of regime formation, or does it merely reflect the fact that the NGOs were not giving much thought to Arctic issues in the late 1980s and early 1990s? Anyone looking at the growing interest of groups like the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), the World Conservation Union, Greenpeace, and the coalition involved in the Arctic Network in the international relations of the Arctic during the last several years might be tempted to conclude that the environmental NGOs simply had not yet picked up on Arctic issues during the formation of the AEPS and the BEAR and thus are likely to be more active in current and future efforts to establish institutional arrangements for the Arctic (e.g., the newly established Arctic Council). But the activities of these nonstate actors will surely merit careful monitoring to see whether this expectation is borne out over the next few years. Beyond this, the cases examined here suggest that we need to think more carefully about two other classes of nonstate actors: indigenous peoples' organizations and subnational units of government. Although indigenous peoples' organizations can be thought of as NGOs themselves which can and do forge coalitions with other NGOs, the creation stories of the AEPS and the BEAR make it clear that these organizations differ from the environmental NGOs in terms of both the nature of their interests and their moral authority. Both cases, but especially the BEAR, also lend weight to the argument that subnational units of government are looming larger at the international level. The role of the Regional Council as the driving force behind the development of the Barents Programme deserves particular attention in this connection.36 Finally, this study lends weight to the proposition that we need to think harder about the roles that individuals play in the process of regime formation. Social scientists desiring to formulate empirically testable generalizations tend to shy away from an examination of individual roles on the grounds that the activities of individuals are too idiosyncratic to support generalizations. Historians endeavoring to construct lively narratives, on the other hand, often highlight the roles of individuals in an effort to infuse their stories with human interest. As students of regime formation, we need to find a middle ground that recognizes both the roles individuals play and the impacts of more impersonal forces, and we must seek to understand the 36. Monsma, "Winds of Change Within the Barents Organization."

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interactions between these forces in our efforts to explain the political dynamics of regime formation.37 When we turn our attention to the specific roles individuals play, the creation stories of the AEPS and the BEAR suggest a need to differentiate two cases: senior officials like Stoltenberg in connection with the BEAR and mid-level officials like Bangay, Edmar, Gronberg, and Rajakoski in connection with the AEPS. The fundamental difference between these cases arises from the fact that senior officials are in a position to exercise structural (as well as entrepreneurial or intellectual) leadership, whereas mid-level officials are confined to the exercise of intellectual and especially entrepreneurial leadership. Thus, Stoltenberg was able to resolve the debate about the BEAR within his own ministry, forge an alliance with Kozyrev that made possible the transition from agenda formation to negotiation, and make financial commitments that were important to the stage of operationalization. The others, by contrast, were constrained by a lack of authority to make commitments of this sort. This is not to say that the contributions of mid-level officials are unimportant.38 But it does mean that we should be on the lookout for two quite different forms of leadership in examining the roles that individuals play. Deriving Implications for Practitioners The principal objective of this book is not to make any direct contribution to the efforts of policymakers responsible for creating specific institutional arrangements but rather to broaden and deepen our understanding of the political dynamics of regime formation. Nevertheless, the analysis presented in this and the preceding chapters does have worthwhile implications for practitioners, and this final section provides a brief account of those implications. It is important to emphasize that practitioners engaged in the formation of specific regimes cannot avoid passing through each of the stages examined in this study. There is no way, for example, to initiate negotiations without going through some process of agenda formation or to jump to the stage of operationalization without engaging in international negotiations. Thus, the policy implications considered in this section center on ways to deal effectively with the various stages of regime formation rather than on a fruitless search for ways to avoid one or another of the stages. 37. For an attempt to respond to this challenge in general terms, see James MacGregor Burns, Leadership, New York: Harper and Row, 1978. 38. When mid-level officials become involved in the exercise of structural power, they ordinarily operate on instructions from their superiors. On the differences among structural leadership, entrepreneurial leadership, and intellectual leadership, see Young, "Political Leadership."

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As I suggested earlier, practitioners need to recognize the distinctions among the three stages of regime formation and attune their activities with care to the political dynamic of the stage at hand. It would be counterproductive, for instance, to present a negotiating text during the stage of agenda formation where the focus of attention is on efforts to establish the discourse in terms of which to talk about the issue at stake and to justify the expenditure of time and energy on that issue in contrast to other items on the international political agenda. Similarly, it would be a mistake to get bogged down during the negotiation stage in detailed discussions of issues best left to the stage of operationalization. By and large, the principal players involved in the creation of the AEPS and the BEAR grasped this point and acted accordingly. There is certainly room for postmortems about certain matters—such as the degree to which the framers of the AEPS Action Plan neglected details about the organizational requirements of individual elements of the plan, or the length of time Stoltenberg delayed before introducing the first real negotiating text of what was to become the Kirkenes Declaration. But the basic message is clear. Because the political dynamics of the three stages of regime formation are not the same, participants in the process must adjust the character of their activities on a stage-by-stage basis in order to achieve success. Another general implication for practitioners concerns the value of preparedness. There is much to be said for a procedure that establishes a separate channel allowing for active consideration of issues likely to arise in subsequent stages of regime formation, even while efforts to deal with the current stage proceed in the main political arena. The case studies offer a number of illustrations of the value of this approach to preparedness. Thus, the meeting of experts organized by Norway in November 1990 to lay the groundwork for the establishment of the AMAP played a significant role in getting the AMAP up and running following the signing of the Rovaniemi Declaration in June 1991.39 The occurrence of this advance work undoubtedly explains why the AEPS contains more detail on this topic than on organizational arrangements relating to the other working groups and why the AMAP became operational at the international level before the other AEPS working groups. Similarly, Stoltenberg's early commissioning of the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo to prepare a series of background papers on the Barents Region provided helpful input into the effort to negotiate the provisions of the Kirkenes Declaration during the fall of 1992. At the same time, the creation stories of the AEPS and the BEAR suggest 39. See Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP)—Minutes from the Expert Meeting in Oslo, 12-16 November 1990, Oslo, Norway: State Pollution Control Authority.

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that policymakers could do much more to organize preparatory activities of this sort that would proceed in channels separate from the main process of regime formation but serve to generate ideas of value to the political process during later stages. There is a need as well for practitioners to make a clear distinction between conflicts of interest and misunderstandings arising out of differences in the political structures and policy cultures of participants. To illustrate, the United States is seen by many as a laggard in efforts to form Arctic regimes, and there is certainly an element of truth in this portrayal. But some of the problems in this realm are properly understood as artifacts of the workings of the American political system rather than as efforts on the part of the United States to block progress toward international cooperation in the Arctic. So, for example, the raft of proposed wording changes that the American delegation brought to the final AEPS preparatory session in June 1991 resulted from the operation of domestic policy clearance procedures; they were not motivated by a desire to derail the effort to reach closure on the terms of the Rovaniemi Declaration. Similarly, the difficulties that the United States has encountered in committing resources to the work of the AMAP during the stage of operationalization are products of the American budgetary process, which involves a great deal of pulling and hauling between the executive and legislative branches of government; they should not be regarded as indicators of American disinterest in the work of the AMAP.40 None of this is to deny the occurrence of real conflicts of interest among participants in all stages of the process of regime formation.. But it is important to stop and ask whether problems arising in specific cases are more matters of misunderstanding attributable to differences in political structures and policy cultures than real conflicts of interest. The crafting of appropriate responses to problems that arise in the regime formation process will be affected by answers to this question. There are as well some implications for practitioners that are specific to one or another of the stages of regime formation. With regard to agenda formation, there is much to be said for making a concerted effort to shape the character of the discourse employed in subsequent stages. The contrast between the AEPS and the BEAR in this regard is instructive. In the case of the 40. Thus, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had extracted a promise that the AEPS would not produce requests for new funds as a condition of its agreement to sign off on the Rovaniemi Declaration in the interagency review process. In the absence of implementing legislation, it proved extremely difficult for line agencies to overcome this political barrier, despite the fact that they found themselves with enhanced responsibility as the actors expected to implement AEPS projects.

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BEAR, the Norwegians captured the discourse and succeeded in creating a regime that reflects Norway's interests in large measure. Contrast this experience with the case of the Finnish Initiative, in which the Finns worked hard to generate interest in establishing an environmental protection regime for the Arctic but failed to control the discourse—a fact that left greater scope for others to shape the underlying vision of the AEPS, especially during the September 1989 meeting in Rovaniemi. Of course, it is important to remember that there are pitfalls associated with undiplomatic efforts to shape the discourse of regime formation. It seems clear, for example, that Stoltenberg paid a price for replacing the existing concept of the North Calotte with the vision of the Barents Region or the Great Calotte without making a more sustained effort to foster Finnish support for this alternative perspective. It is particularly interesting to note, in this case, that the cost of this early action did not become apparent until the operationalization stage, when the lukewarm feelings of Finnish policymakers became an undeniable reality. Thus, although efforts to shape the discourse during the stage of agenda formation can be extremely beneficial, overbearing actions in this context can give rise to hidden costs that do not become apparent until a later stage. With respect to the negotiation stage, the central message of this book is that life during this stage does not take place, for the most part, on the Pareto frontier.41 Typically, the actual locus of this frontier is unknown, and the participants make no real effort to locate it. As a result, success during the negotiation stage requires a different set of skills than those we associate with the deployment of committal tactics under conditions of distributive bargaining. Some individuals become extraordinarily skillful in the process of devising negotiating texts and moving them step-by-step to the point where the square brackets are removed and the parties are prepared to adopt final texts as integrated packages. The brilliant performance of Tommy Koh of Singapore during the law of the sea negotiations of the 1970s and 1980s stands as a striking example of this type of skill.42 But even in less prominent cases, like the AEPS and the BEAR, skill is important. The roles of individuals like Bangay, Beesley, Edmar, and Gronberg in the case of the AEPS, for instance, certainly made a difference in the success of this process of regime formation. Without entering the debate about whether such 41. Krasner, "Global Communications and National Power." 42. For a remarkably candid account of the exercise of such skill in the case of climate change, see Tommy Thong-Bee Koh, "The Earth Summit's Negotiating Process: Some Reflections on the Art and Science of Negotiation," Seventh Singapore Law Review Lecture, National University of Singapore, 15 December 1992.

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activities constitute an art or a science, there is much to be said for the proposition that individuals can learn to exercise these skills effectively.43 The development of a cadre of individuals who possess such skills and who can exercise them in a variety of settings should be a priority for actors desiring to succeed in regime formation both in terms of their own interests and in terms of the common interest in solving collective-action problems.44 Finally, there is much to be said for launching a conscious effort to improve our understanding of operationalization at the international level. Partly, this is a matter of identifying and evaluating models that may prove useful in a variety of settings. The experts' seminar that took place in Oslo during November 1990 was an important step in connection with the creation of the AMAP. Focusing for the most part on applying experience gathered in connection with LRTAP to environmental protection in the Arctic, this exercise was surely a step in the right direction. But it would have been even more useful to have canvassed a range of options and engaged in a careful assessment of the relative merits of alternative ways of organizing the AMAP. As the cases demonstrate, other processes of operationalization have gone forward in an even more ad hoc manner. In part, the issue of operationalization is a matter of procedure. There is no need in cases like the AEPS and the BEAR to establish preparatory commissions or committees to move things along while waiting, sometimes for years, for a legally binding convention to enter into force. Still, there are a number of procedural matters, ranging from deciding whether to establish one or more secretariats to determining whether to accord diplomatic status to secretariat employees, that regularly slow down the process of operationalization at the international level but that could be handled with greater dispatch if there existed a set of well-defined practices to draw on in this connection. There is no reason, under the circumstances, why the two-to-three-year process of setting up international mechanisms to administer a regime like the AEPS could not be shortened considerably.

Closing the Circle Both the AEPS and the BEAR are now well into the stage of day-to-day operation. The extent to which each of these regimes has contributed to solving the problems that motivated its members to create it in the first 43. See, for example, Howard Raiffa, The Art and Science of Negotiation, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. 44. For an interesting collection of essays in which practitioners express their views on such matters, see Mintzer and Leonard, eds., Negotiating Climate Change.

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place is a complex issue beyond the scope of this study.45 In the meantime, efforts to form new regimes are occurring regularly both in the Arctic and in other settings. With regard to the Arctic, the most significant processes of regime formation under way at this time involve efforts to begin the process of operationalizing the Arctic Council, an encompassing organization with a mandate to consider issues pertaining to the Arctic as a whole and to prepare for negotiations dealing with a collection of interlocking issues arising in the Bering Sea region.46 As current AEPS activities are reconstituted as programs of the Arctic Council, the council is likely to develop in such a way that it subsumes the AEPS. To what extent can the account of the political dynamics of regime formation set forth in this book help us understand processes of regime formation taking place in new cases? Can this new understanding help those responsible for regime formation in these cases? If the ideas summarized in this chapter are persuasive, the results of this study should contribute substantially to resolving a number of puzzles that have arisen in the wake of previous research on regime formation. Along the way, I hope to have contributed in a modest fashion to the larger enterprise of meeting the growing demand for governance in international society.

45. For discussions that address this issue in the case of the AEPS, see Donald R. Rothwell, "The Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy and Environmental Protection," paper presented at the International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences, 28 May-1 June 1995, Rovaniemi, Finland; David Scrivener, "From Functional Cooperation to an Arctic Regime?" paper presented at the Calotte Academy, 21 May 1995, Inari, Finland; and Young, "The Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy: Looking Backward, Looking Forward." 46. For a well-informed account of the development of the idea of an Arctic Council, see David Scrivener, "Environmental Cooperation in the Arctic." Background on the Bering Sea Region can be found in Richard Townsend, ed., Proceedings of the Conference on Shared Living Resources of the Bering Sea Region, Washington, D.C.: Council on Environmental Quality, 1990.

Appendix A

DECORATION ON THE PROTECTION OF THE ARCTIC ENVIRONMENT June 14, 1991 We, the Representatives of the Governments of Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America; Meeting at Rovaniemi, Finland for the First Ministerial Conference on the Protection of the Arctic Environment; Deeply concerned with threats to the Arctic environment and the impact of pollution on fragile Arctic ecosystems; Acknowledging the growing national and international appreciation of the importance of Arctic ecosystems and an increasing knowledge of global pollution and resulting environmental threats; Resolving to pursue together in other international environmental fora those issues affecting the Arctic environment which require broad international cooperation; Emphasizing our responsibility to protect and preserve the Arctic environment and recognizing the special relationship of the indigenous peoples and local populations to the Arctic and their unique contribution to the protection of the Arctic Environment; Hereby adopt the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy and commit ourselves to take steps towards its implementation and consider its further elaboration. We commit ourselves to a joint Action Plan of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy which includes: • Cooperation in scientific research to specify sources, pathways, sinks and effects of pollution, in particular, oil, acidification, persistent organic contaminants, radioactivity, noise and heavy metals as well as sharing of these data; • Assessment of potential environmental impacts of development activities; 200

Appendices 201 • Full implementation and consideration of further measures to control pollutants and reduce their adverse effects to the Arctic environment. We intend to assess on a continuing basis the threats to the Arctic environment through the preparation and updating of reports on the state of the Arctic environment, in order to propose further cooperative action. We also commit ourselves to implement the following measures of the Strategy: • Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) to monitor the levels of, and assess the effects of, anthropogenic pollutants in all components of the Arctic environment. To this end, an Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Task Force will be established. Norway will provide for an AMAP secretariat. • Protection of the Marine Environment in the Arctic, to take preventive and other measures directly or through competent international organizations regarding marine pollution in the Arctic irrespective of origin; • Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response in the Arctic, to provide a framework for future cooperation in responding to the threat of environmental emergencies. • Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna, to facilitate the exchange of information and coordination of research on species and habitats of flora and fauna; We agree to hold regular meetings to assess the progress made and to coordinate actions which will implement and further develop the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy. We agree to continue to promote cooperation with the Arctic indigenous peoples and to invite their organizations to future meetings as observers. We agree to meet in 1993 and accept the kind invitation of the Government of Denmark and the Home Rule Government of Greenland to hold the next meeting in Greenland. Wherefore, we, the undersigned Representatives of our respective Governments, recognizing its political significance and environmental importance, and intending to promote its results, have signed this Declaration.

Appendix B

ARCTIC ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION STRATEGY June 14, 1991 [Extracts from text] CONTENTS PREFACE

i

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ii

1. INTRODUCTION

1

2. OBJECTIVES AND PRINCIPLES 2.1 Objectives 2.2 Principles

4 4 4

3. PROBLEMS AND PRIORITIES 3.1 Persistent Organic Contaminants 3.2 Oil Pollution 3.3 Heavy Metals 3.4 Noise 3.5 Radioactivity 3.6 Acidification

7 8 10 12 13 15 16

4. INTERNATIONAL MECHANISMS FOR THE PROTECTION OF THE ARCTIC ENVIRONMENT 4.1 Persistent Organic Contaminants 4.2 Oil Pollution 4.3 Heavy Metals 4.4 Noise 4.5 Radioactivity 4.6 Acidification

18 18 19 20 21 21 22

5. ACTIONS 5.1 Persistent Organic Contaminants 5.2 Oil Pollution 5.3 Heavy Metals 5.4 Noise

24 24 26 27 27 202

Appendices 5.5 Radioactivity 5.6 Acidification

203

28 29

6. ARCTIC MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT PROGRAM 6.1 Actions

30 32

7. PROTECTION OF THE ARCTIC MARINE ENVIRONMENT

34

8. EMERGENCY PREVENTION, PREPAREDNESS AND RESPONSE 8.1 Actions

36 37

9. CONSERVATION OF ARCTIC FLORA AND FAUNA 9.1 Actions

39 40

10. FURTHER COOPERATION

44

2. OBJECTIVES AND PRINCIPLES 2.1 Objectives The objectives of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy are: i) To protect the Arctic ecosystem including humans; ii) To provide for the protection, enhancement and restoration of environmental quality and the sustainable utilization of natural resources, including their use by local populations and indigenous peoples in the Arctic; iii) To recognize and, to the extent possible, seek to accommodate the traditional and cultural needs, values and practices of the indigenous peoples as determined by themselves, related to the protection of the Arctic environment; iv) To review regularly the state of the Arctic environment; v) To identify, reduce, and, as a final goal, eliminate pollution. 2.2 Principles: The Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy and its implementation by the eight Arctic countries will be guided by the following principles: i) Management, planning and development activities shall provide for the conservation, sustainable utilization and protection of Arctic ecosystems and natural resources for the benefit and enjoyment of present and future generations, including indigenous peoples; ii) Use and management of natural resources shall be based on an approach which considers the value and interdependent nature of ecosystem components:

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iii) Management, planning and development activities which may significantly affect the Arctic ecosystems shall: a) be based on informed assessments of their possible impacts on the Arctic environment, including cumulative impacts; b) provide for the maintenance of the region's ecological systems and biodiversity; c) respect the Arctic's significance for and influence on the global climate; d) be compatible with the sustainable utilization of Arctic ecosystems; e) take into account the results of scientific investigations and the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples; vi) Information and knowledge concerning Arctic ecosystems and resource use will be developed and shared to support planning and should precede, accompany and follow development activities; vii) Consideration of the health, social, economic and cultural needs and values of indigenous peoples shall be incorporated into management, planning and development activities; viii) Development of a network of protected areas shall be encouraged and promoted with due regard for the needs of indigenous peoples; ix) International cooperation to protect the Arctic environment shall be supported and promoted. x) Mutual cooperation in fulfilling national and international responsibilities in the Arctic consistent with this Strategy, including the use, transfer and/or trade, of the most effective and appropriate technology to protect the environment, shall be promoted and developed. 3. PROBLEMS AND PRIORITIES At the first meeting in 1989 of the eight Arctic countries there was early recognition that many of the environmental problems that individual nations had been addressing, were in fact shared amongst the eight. To begin with, six specific pollution issues were identified as requiring attention. These issues were associated with persistent organic contaminants, oil, heavy metals, noise, radioactivity, and acidification. State of the Environment Reports were prepared on each of these topics and have been published separately. It was also agreed that these will be updated as necessary. It was reported that the ability to completely understand these issues was restricted by the lack of a comprehensive scientific data base and coordinated monitoring program on the state of Arctic ecosystems. Furthermore,

Appendices

205

the potential impact of these specific pollutants on Arctic flora and fauna underlined the need to consider establishing a mechanism to facilitate a cooperative approach to their conservation. Other environmental problems including the depletion of the ozone layer and global warming were not addressed because they were already being considered in other fora. It was also determined that since the Arctic environment is particularly vulnerable to accidental discharges and uncontrolled releases of pollutants, enhanced mechanisms to address environmental emergencies in the Arctic were needed. 3.1 Persistent Organic Contaminants The use and production of persistent organic contaminants (e.g. polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), DDT, hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH), chlordane and toxaphene has been stopped or restricted in some countries, however, many are still widely manufactured and used on a global basis. They are hazardous environmental contaminants due to their high stability and persistence in the environment, potential for bioaccumulation and high chronic toxicity, and the large quantities which have been released into the environment. Although there are no major sources of these contaminants in the Arctic, they, nevertheless, reach the Arctic environment via long-range transport by rivers, the atmosphere and ocean currents from more industrialized centres, particularly Asia, Europe and North America. Due to the highly lipophilic nature of most chlorinated organic contaminants, they become concentrated in the fatty tissues of species in the Arctic food chain. The highest levels of contaminants are therefore detected in the blubber and fat tissue of animals at the top of the food chain (e.g. polar bears, whales and seals). This is of particular concern in the Arctic because of the high level of consumption of lipid-rich wildlife foods by residents, resulting in a pathway of these contaminants to humans. The presence of chlorinated organic contaminants has been reported in human populations throughout the world. The level of PCBs in breast milk samples collected from Inuit women in northern Quebec, was approximately five times higher than that of Caucasian women living in southern Quebec, Canada. The variable and generally sparse data base on chlorinated organic contaminants in the Arctic prohibits for the most part, the determination of any spatial or temporal trends. In Canadian studies, chlordane compound residue levels in polar bear fat have been reported to be four times higher in 1984 than in 1969, while levels of DDT did not change and other chlorinated contaminants measures were twice as high. Concentrations of chlorinated organic contaminants in the Arctic ecosystem are generally lower than in heavily polluted areas such as the Great Lakes,

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or the Baltic Sea. There are, however, some exceptions—the more volatile compounds (e.g. HCB, toxaphene) are often detected in the Arctic at concentrations similar to those in source regions. Little is known about the potential effects of chlorinated organic contaminants on the ecosystem. However, there is evidence that a broad spectrum of contaminants is reaching the Arctic and there is sufficient toxicological data as well as field data to make reasonable extrapolations with regard to ecosystem consequences in the Arctic. Chronic effects of chlorinated organic contamination observed in other regions (e.g. reproductive failure, bill and foot abnormalities, cancer) are of the most significance. The lower concentrations detected in the Arctic do not diminish the potential significance of their effects on ecosystem health. 3.2 Oil Pollution The Arctic is one of the areas most vulnerable to adverse impacts from chronic and acute oil pollution. This is due to physical environmental conditions such as low temperature, periods with little or no light, ice cover etc. Low temperatures lead to reduced evaporation of the more volatile, toxic oil components. Dark, cold winters in the Arctic lead to reduced ultraviolet radiation and biological decomposition of oil. In areas of drift ice, oil dispersal caused by wave action is also reduced. Oil in iced areas will be trapped between ice floes or under the ice, and only partly transported to the ice surface. These factors result in a generally slower decomposition of oil in the Arctic than in temperate regions. The period in which a particular oil spill can be harmful to wildlife is thus comparatively longer in the Arctic. The marginal ice zone is particularly vulnerable to oil pollution. A large part of the primary production in the Arctic, is found in this zone, which makes it extremely important for the whole Arctic ecosystem. Although there is no evidence that an oil spill reduces primary productivity to a significant degree, direct effects on marine life can be devastating, especially in the marginal ice zones. Feathers and fur contaminated by oil quickly lose their insulating properties, and the oil will often cause skin inflammation. Both will lead to a negative energy balance of the affected animal. Ingested oil, in particular unweathered oil with a high content of volatile substances, can cause serious intoxication of birds and mammals. No studies indicate that any of these species tend to avoid oil spills. The amount of information available on oil spills in the Arctic, and probably the accuracy of the estimated quantities, varies considerably. Information on continuous discharges is scarce, and estimates of indirect oil transport (atmosphere, ocean currents, and rivers) have not been available. Order of

Appendices

207

magnitude calculations show that river transport is the main contribution of oil pollution to the Arctic (estimated at 200,000 metric tons per annum). The highest risk of oil spills is connected with transportation activities and production of oil as well as to a lesser degree, exploration activities. Their occurrence will depend on the level of activity in the Arctic, the technical standards of the activity and the preventative measures taken. The physical constraints caused by Arctic conditions imply particular technological challenges regarding oil spill clean up. Effective methods and techniques for containing and cleaning up oil spills from water and ice are currently limited. The available information on ambient oil pollution in the Arctic is scarce. More information is needed, obtained with standardized methodologies in order to have comparable data for the whole region, with special emphasis on fluvial inputs and concentrations in surface marine waters. 3.3 Heavy Metals Levels of heavy metals have been found in the air, precipitation, ocean waters, soils, rivers, lakes and bottom sediments of the Arctic as well as in marine, freshwater and terrestrial biota. These levels occur as a result of natural phenomena as well as from regional sources and global transport. Heavy metal concentrations in air and precipitation are mainly due to longrange atmospheric transport from industrial centers resulting in a deposition of heavy metals on vegetation, snow, and the sea which generally decreases from south to north. To a lesser extent discharges from local mining operations and the methylation of inorganic mercury often associated with large scale impoundments of water in previously vegetated areas (i.e. hydroelectric developments), also account for elevated heavy metal concentrations. Canadian and Finnish studies indicate methyl mercury levels in fish rise measurably after the flooding of new reservoirs, depending upon the amount of organic material present. The temporal trends of long-range heavy metal pollution of the Arctic particularly mercury, cadmium, lead, arsenic and nickel have been determined by analyzing ice cores from glaciers. There has been an increasing trend since the middle of the 19th century and a sharp increase in the 20th century. Recent analyses of vegetation seem to indicate that a decrease may now be occurring. The concentrations of heavy metals in lakes and rivers are generally higher than in Arctic sea water. A decrease in pH caused by acid precipitation increases the dissolution rates of heavy metals which may increase the rate of accumulation in the biota.

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In the Arctic marine environment the concentrations of heavy metals in water are low compared to more southerly latitudes. However, the concentrations in biota increase in the food chain, and in the top level predators such as seals and whales the concentrations, especially of cadmium, increase to levels much higher than observed in other areas. For example, in some Canadian studies, cadmium levels in narwhal kidney were among the highest ever reported in marine mammals. This build-up is probably due to naturally occurring phenomena, but such occurrences make increases in the concentrations of heavy metals in the Arctic marine environment as a result of industrial sources more problematic than elsewhere. The high concentrations of heavy metals in marine mammals and some bird species constitute a problem in districts where tissues from such animals constitute a significant part of the diet. Thus increased concentrations of mercury have been found in Greenlanders from hunting districts. Elevated levels of mercury have also been found in the Native populations of Northern Quebec, Canada. 3.4 Noise The waters of the Arctic region are a unique noise environment mainly due to the presence of ice. The ambient noise is strongly influenced by the dynamic processes of ice formation, melt, deformation and movement. This situation is different from ice free waters. In periods where ice cracking and wind noise are absent areas covered by shore-fast ice are among the quietest underwater environments. Human activities create noise types and levels, which may disturb marine mammals, or mask the "natural" sounds of importance to those mammals. Some types of noise may affect fish as well as marine mammals. There are a number of serious gaps in our knowledge of the effects of underwater noise on marine mammals, including the inability to assess the effect of repeated noise exposure on stocks. There is considerable evidence that most types of disturbance do not cause mortality. However, some noisy activities, including low level overflights by aircraft, near seals and walrus at haul out sites can cause mortality through stampedes or abandonment. Many marine mammals seem able to adapt to or at least tolerate many types of disturbances or increased noise levels. However the scarcity of direct evidence of serious consequences from disturbances does not necessarily mean that marine mammals are not stressed or affected in some other way. Noise from human activities may cause short-term or long-term behavioral actions and temporary displacement of various marine mammals. The biological significance of most of these reactions is unknown.

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209

Moving sound sources, notably boats and aircraft, seem to be more disturbing than stationary sources, e.g. dredges and drillships. The effects on fish and wildlife of cumulative exposure to noise are largely unknown. 3.5 Radioactivity There have been two major causes of radioactive contamination affecting the Arctic region: atmospheric nuclear-weapons testing during the 1950s and 1960s and the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986. Of greatest concern are the long-lived radionuclides, including Strontium-90 (29 year half-life) and Cesium-137 (30 year half-life). Studies have shown that these fallout derived radionuclides are efficiently retained by surface vegetation, especially lichen, in this nutrient-poor environment and are biologically recycled in Arctic ecosystems. As a result, those indigenous peoples and local populations consuming as their main food caribou or reindeer meat with elevated levels of radiocesium, may have accumulated higher levels. Other radioactive threats to the environment exist, e.g. accidental discharges which are of a biological significance associated with nuclear power sources and transport, storage and disposal of radioactive waste. When considering the total radiation dose, attention should be given to the radiation from man-made sources and to natural radiation. A number of bilateral and multilateral arrangements, including those with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), address issues related to exchange of information, early notification of radiation release, emergency preparedness and response to nuclear accidents and transboundary movement of radioactive materials. 3.6 Acidification The most important acidifying substances are sulphur and nitrogen compounds emitted mainly by vehicles, industrial activities and coal and oil based power plants. Long-range transport is the most important factor influencing the air quality in the Arctic especially in winter. The sulphur and nitrogen emission from industrial activities in the Arctic is also a considerable factor. Until now, little emphasis has been placed on the effects of acid deposition on Arctic ecosystems. Furthermore, knowledge derived from studies in temperate zones is not directly relevant to the Arctic. One of the most well known examples of a problem associated with acidity in the Arctic is the Arctic haze phenomenon produced from acid pollutant aerosols. Arctic haze has been under intense study and much is known about its nature, distribution and composition. Acidification is evolving into a prominent environmental problem around certain northern industrial centers. In northern Fennoscandia, in the northwestern parts of the Soviet

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Union and in the eastern parts of Canada, natural factors increase the sensitivity to acidification and anthropogenic impacts have extended through the whole area. The interaction between acidic deposition and the soils of different ecosystems is an important component of the acidification process. A continuous excessive acid load leads to the mobilization of aluminum and heavy metals. The combined effects of acid deposition and the stresses already induced by the harsh climate increase the possibility of vegetation damage in the Arctic. Critical loads, rates of acidification, and conditions influencing cold climate environments need more detailed regional monitoring and research. In general, northern ecosystems are under greater stress than temperate ecosystems. 6. ARCTIC MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT PROGRAM The eight Arctic countries recognize that the Arctic region represents one of the relatively pristine areas on earth. It is therefore of great importance to preserve and to protect the Arctic. Measurements in the Arctic indicate that pollutants originating from anthropogenic activities in the mid-latitudes are transported to the Arctic by atmospheric processes, ocean currents and rivers, and that pollutants are deposited and accumulated in the Arctic environment and its ecosystems. Exploitation of natural resources, and concomitant urban and industrial expansion within the Arctic region, also contribute to the degradation of the Arctic environment and affect the living conditions for the people of the region. Distinguishing human-induced changes from changes caused by natural phenomena in the Arctic will require monitoring of selected key indicators of the Arctic Environment. Therefore, the eight Arctic countries have agreed to promote development of an Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) in order to understand and document these changes and so that the monitoring results may be used to anticipate adverse biological, chemical and physical changes to the ecosystem and to prevent, minimize and mitigate these adverse effects. The primary objective of the AMAP is the measurement of the levels of anthropogenic pollutants and the assessment of their effects in relevant component parts of the Arctic environment. The assessments should be presented in status reports to relevant fora as a basis for necessary steps to be taken to reduce the pollution. Two of the most significant threats to the present Arctic environment may come from climate change, induced by global warming, and the effects of stratospheric ozone depletion. Programs to detect and determine the causes

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and effects of climate change and ozone depletion are to a large extent being developed by other international groupings and in other fora. It is important for AMAP to be aware of these programs and to develop links with them from an Arctic perspective in order to encourage and facilitate an Arctic component in climate programs. Data obtained for assessing climate change will provide important inputs to the AMAP dataset. In turn, AMAP data will be relevant to climate change programs in the Arctic. The pollution data available from the Arctic region are with a few exceptions based on research programs performed within limited subject areas by national programs and not supported by bilateral or international cooperation. There is an urgent need for cooperation among local and regional efforts and global programs in order to obtain better documentation on the environmental situation in the Arctic especially with regard to long-range air and marine pollution. From the outset, the AMAP should as far as possible be based on existing programs. The program should be initiated in a step by step fashion as indicated in the proposal for the AMAP. 6.1 Actions i) Distinguishing human-induced changes from changes caused by natural phenomena in the Arctic will require estimates and regular reporting by the Arctic countries of contaminant emissions and discharges, including accidental discharges, as well as transport and deposition. In addition monitoring of deposition and selected key indicators of the Arctic biological environment, are required. The eight Arctic countries should therefore agree to establish an Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) to fulfill these monitoring objectives. ii) The AMAP should be implemented through the establishment of an Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Task Force and a small secretariat, established by the Government of Norway. iii) AMAP should as far as possible build upon existing programs. Thus, one of the important tasks of the AMAP will be to review and coordinate existing national programs, establish a data directory, and to develop these programs when appropriate in an international framework. iv) As an initial priority, the AMAP should focus on persistent organic contaminants and on selected heavy metals and radionuclides, and ultimately to monitor ecological indicators to provide a basis for assessments of the status of Arctic ecosystems. v) The eight Arctic countries will receive regular State of the Arctic Environment Reports summarizing the results of the AMAP.

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As a result of these actions, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program will provide information for: i) integrated assessment reports on status and trends in the condition of Arctic ecosystems; ii) identifying possible causes for changing conditions; iii) detecting emerging problems, their possible causes, and the potential risk to Arctic ecosystems including indigenous peoples and other Arctic residents; and iv) recommending actions required to reduce risks to Arctic ecosystems. 7. PROTECTION OF THE ARCTIC MARINE ENVIRONMENT The eight Arctic Countries recognize their particular interests and responsibilities as neighbouring countries in the Arctic, and emphasize the need to take preventive measures directly or through competent international organizations, consistent in particular with the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea regarding marine pollution in the Arctic, irrespective of origin. To this end the Arctic countries agree to: i) Apply the principles concerning the protection and preservation of the Marine Environment as reflected in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and, in accordance with the continuing development of international environmental law, to further strengthen rules in order to protect the Arctic; ii) Take measures as soon as possible to adhere to the strictest relevant international standards within the conventions, to which the countries are parties, regarding discharges irrespective of origin; iii) Undertake joint actions in relevant international fora to further strengthen recognition of the particularly sensitive character of icecovered parts of the Arctic Ocean; iv) Review, in accordance with the general aims of this environmental Strategy, the relevance to the Arctic of international instruments connected with the protection of the marine environment, with the aim that all Arctic countries accede, where appropriate, to the instruments, or apply the principles and regulations embodied therein; v) Jointly support the appropriate initiatives of international organizations in developing mandatory standards in order to improve the protection against accidental pollution affecting the marine environment, and actively ensure application of such standards; vi) Carry out studies of pollution in the monitoring activities within AMAP.

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8. EMERGENCY PREVENTION, PREPAREDNESS AND RESPONSE At the same time as the Arctic is exhibiting signs of serious contamination from pollutants carried via long range transport from mid latitudes, there has been an increase in development activities and shipping within the Arctic. These activities can have serious environmental consequences in the Arctic as a result of accidents leading, inter alia, to spills and discharges of oil and other harmful substances. The vulnerability of the Arctic ecosystem to these sudden intrusions will be variable. Some limited mapping of areas sensitive to oil spills has been conducted but more remains to be done. The relative hazard/risk associated with different activities is also not well documented, nor is the geographic distribution of high risk activities. There are a number of bilateral, regional and global arrangements which presently exist to deal with accidental pollution, such as the 1983 CanadaDenmark Agreement for Cooperating relating to the Marine Environment, the 1971 Agreement between Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden on Cooperation on Oil Pollution and the 1990 International Convention on Oil Pollution Preparedness, Response and Cooperation. There are other multilateral conventions related to nuclear accidents or radiological emergencies supplemented by bilateral agreements on the exchange of information and reporting relative to nuclear plants and events. The UN ECE has started work on an international convention, on the prevention and control of the transboundary effects of industrial accidents. A part of the work is the establishment or reinforcement of regional and subregional mechanisms for response, assistance and exchange of information on environmental emergencies. 8.1 Actions The Arctic countries agree to the following framework for taking early cooperative action on emergency prevention, preparedness and response in the Arctic. They will take steps to review existing bilateral and multilateral arrangements in order to evaluate the adequacy of the geographical coverage of the Arctic regions by cooperative agreements. They will also take steps to convene a meeting of experts to consider and recommend the necessary system of cooperation, which could include, inter alia, the following elements: i) Actions to respond to significant accidental pollution from any source; ii) Coordination and harmonization of preventive policies, strategies and measures; iii) Establishment of a system for early notification in the event of significant accidental pollution or an imminent threat of such pollution.

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iv) Assessment of the risks for significant accidental pollution and of the adverse effects in such cases so as to enable the parties to take the necessary preventive, preparedness and response measures; v) Inclusion of studies on effects of accidental pollution in conjunction with the monitoring activities of AMAP; vi) Cooperation in the conduct of research into and development of methods and technologies for prevention of, preparedness for and response to significant accidental pollution in the Arctic; vii) Cooperation in developing a system for exchange of information on research and new developments regarding methods and technologies on response in the Arctic; viii) Exchange of information on legislative and administrative measures as well as policies; ix) Measures for providing information to the public and public participation; and x) Further enhance regional bilateral and multilateral cooperation in the Arctic regarding prevention, preparedness and response by developing, as appropriate, contingency plans, training programs, as well as other measures to facilitate assistance to the parties, in particular mutual assistance for efficient emergency response in the event of significant accidental pollution, or the imminent threat of such pollution. 9. CONSERVATION OF ARCTIC FLORA AND FAUNA The health of Arctic flora and fauna is a key concern of the Arctic countries. These flora and fauna assume special significance in this region since they are an essential factor helping to define the culture and survival of the people living there. Although isolated geographically from the industrialized temperate regions of the globe, it has now been amply demonstrated that this has not excluded Arctic flora and fauna from the negative consequences of human activities in mid latitudes. The impacts on the Arctic have escalated over the past several decades and both scientific and traditional knowledge have been pointing to the danger signals. Many of these concerns are enumerated in the six Arctic State of the Environment reports. They confirm that Arctic flora, fauna and their habitats are being threatened by large scale economic development projects; long range transport of pollutants; and degradation of habitats. The problems facing Arctic flora, fauna and habitats are not confined to any one country but are circumpolar in nature. Furthermore, because of the uniqueness of Arctic ecosystems, strategies to deal with these problems will differ from those of other regions.

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Several multilateral and bilateral agreements which pertain to the conservation of Arctic flora and fauna and their habitats are currently in existence. Most however, have been designed to be universally applicable to, or to apply to, a wider geographical area than the Arctic. Only the Agreement on Conservation of Polar Bears and some individual provisions in other agreements provide a specific Arctic focus. The eight Arctic countries should therefore seek to create a distinct forum for scientists, indigenous peoples and conservation managers engaged in Arctic flora, fauna and habitat related activities to exchange data and information on issues such as shared species and habitats and to collaborate, as appropriate, for more effective research, sustainable utilization and conservation.

9.1 The eight Arctic countries are mindful of the need to conserve Arctic flora and fauna and their habitats in their natural diversity, and protect these resources from the pollution threats described in this Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy. They recognize the special relationship and importance of Arctic flora and fauna and their habitats to indigenous peoples. The countries also recognize the benefits to be gained from sharing scientific and management information, traditional knowledge, and other data with respect to Arctic flora and fauna and their habitats. With due regard to existing international cooperation, and in an effort to improve research and information aimed at protecting these resources and their habitats from pollution and environmental degradation, they have reached the following understanding: i) The eight Arctic countries will cooperate for the conservation of Arctic flora and fauna, their diversity, and their habitats. Such cooperation shall include, inter alia, exchanges of research and management information and data, and coordination of research, on the following: a) Arctic species, their health and habitats; b) the laws, regulations and practices of the parties with respect to the conservation and management of such species; and c) the importance and relationship to, and use of, such species by indigenous peoples and the unique contribution of indigenous peoples to the stewardship of nature and its resources; ii) Each country will provide to the other countries, as appropriate, such information, publications, and/or documents as may be agreed under the terms of the Strategy; iii) The eight Arctic countries will seek to develop other forms of cooperation, including exchanges of experts, of traditional knowledge, and of other data, as well as engaging in joint projects, bilateral or multilateral

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APPENDICES meetings, symposia and joint publications, to meet the intent of this Strategy;

iv) The eight Arctic countries will each seek to develop more effective laws, regulations and practices for the conservation of Arctic flora and fauna, their diversity, and their habitats in close cooperation with Arctic indigenous peoples; v) The eight Arctic countries agree to establish a mechanism for furthering the following aims in close cooperation with Arctic indigenous peoples: a) Promoting and facilitating exchanges of information and personnel as provided for in this Strategy; b) Making recommendations with respect to the priorities, the orientation and the nature of research and monitoring programs of the Arctic countries; c) Proposing strategies for enhanced conservation of Arctic species and their habitats; and d) Regularly compiling and disseminating information on activities regarding the conservation of Arctic flora and fauna. vi) The eight Arctic countries will consult, as deemed appropriate with the International Arctic Science Committee and other bodies on any matter that falls within the scope of this Strategy; vii) By October 1991 each Country will identify to the others its national agency designated to coordinate the cooperation envisaged by this section; viii) The Countries agree that the terms and conditions of the cooperation and exchanges provided for in this section will be subject to the laws and regulations of the Countries; ix) Each country will make its best efforts to provide resources adequate to carry out its responsibilities under this section. It is understood that the ability of each country to carry out activities is subject to the availability of funds, and that countries will seek to ensure long-term funding for necessary projects.

Appendix C

DECLARATION ON COOPERATION IN THE BARENTS EURO-ARCTIC REGION January 11, 1993 INTRODUCTION A conference on cooperation in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region took place in Kirkenes, Norway, on 11 January, 1993. The Ministers of Foreign Affairs or representatives of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the Russian Federation, Sweden and the Commission of the European Communities participated in the conference, which was also attended by observers from the United States of America, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, and the United Kingdom. The Participants expressed their conviction that expanded cooperation in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region will contribute substantially to stability and progress in the area and in Europe as a whole, where partnership is now replacing the confrontation and division of the past. The Participants felt that such cooperation will contribute to international peace and security. The Participants saw the Barents cooperation initiative as part of the process of evolving European cooperation and integration, which has been given a new dimension with the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. They considered the establishment of a Council of the Baltic Sea States in Copenhagen in March 1992 as a further contribution to strengthening regional cooperation in Europe. They also stated their conviction that the establishment of closer cooperation in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region will be an important contribution to the new European architecture, providing closer ties between the Northern parts of Europe and the rest of the European continent. The Participants expressed support for the ongoing process of reform in Russia which aims inter alia at strengthening democracy, market reforms, and local institutions, and which is therefore important for closer regional cooperation in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region. 217

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The Participants expressed their desire to support the long-standing aspirations of the peoples in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region for friendship and cooperation, and stressed the fundamental significance of the historical changes caused by the end of ideological and military confrontation in Europe. They welcomed the initial steps that have been taken at the local and regional level to expand cooperation, in particular, the establishment of an interregional working group by counties in Finland, Norway, Russia and Sweden. They expressed their appreciation for the valuable work carried out by the northernmost counties of Finland, Norway and Sweden in the "Nordkalottkomiteen" during the past two decades. They took note of the report from the Expert Conference on the Region in Kirkenes on 25-27 September, 1992. They also took note of the October 1992 International Expert Conference on the Northern Sea Route in Tromso, Norway. THE BARENTS EURO-ARCTIC COUNCIL AND ITS OBJECTIVES The Participants recognised the features characteristic of this Arctic Region, especially its harsh climate, sparse population and vast territory. They agreed therefore to examine how they can improve the conditions for local cooperation between local authorities, institutions, industry and commerce across the borders of the Region. To this end, the Participants agreed to establish a Council of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region, hereinafter called the Council, to provide impetus to existing cooperation and consider new initiatives and proposals. The terms of reference are set out in the annex. The objective of the work of the Council will be to promote sustainable development in the Region, bearing in mind the principles and recommendations set out in the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21 of UNCED. To this end, the Council will serve as a forum for considering bilateral and multilateral cooperation in the fields of economy, trade, science and technology, tourism, the environment, infrastructure, educational and cultural exchange, as well as projects particularly aimed at improving the situation of indigenous peoples in the North. The Participants emphasized that the Council will not duplicate or replace ongoing work in other bilateral or multilateral fora, but will where appropriate seek to given impetus and coherence to regional cooperation and encourage new common efforts, bilateral and multilateral, to meet the challenges and opportunities facing the Region. They welcomed the establishment of a Regional Council of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region which will include county officials in the area constituting the Region and representation of the indigenous peoples of the Region.

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PARTICIPATION AND AREA OF APPLICATION The Participants emphasized that cooperation in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region is open to those states that wish to take an active part. The Participants decided that regional cooperation in the Barents EuroArctic Region will comprise the county of Lapland in Finland, the counties of Finnmark, Troms and Nordland in Norway, the counties of Murmansk and Archangel in Russia, and the county of Norrbotten in Sweden. They noted that the Region might be extended to include other counties in the future. THE ENVIRONMENT

The Participants recalled the Joint Declaration from the meeting of the Ministers of Environment of the Nordic Countries and the Russian Federation in Kirkenes on 3 September, 1993, and the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic signed on 22 September, 1992, and underlined the importance of strengthening bilateral and multilateral cooperation to protect the vulnerable environment of the Region. The Participants reaffirmed their commitment to the Strategy for Protection of the Arctic Environment, adopted at the Ministerial Meeting in Rovaniemi in 1991, and to the ongoing work in implementing that strategy, especially within the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP). An action programme to assess and prevent the risk of pollution from emissions from industry, nuclear installations, and dumping of hazardous waste in the Region is urgently needed and should be prepared in due time for presentation at the next Ministerial Meeting for the Protection of the Arctic Environment on 14-16 September, 1993 at Nuuk, Greenland. The Participants emphasized that the environmental dimension must be fully integrated into all activities in the Region, inter alia, through the establishment by the states in the Region of common ecological criteria for the exploitation of natural resources and the prevention of pollution at source and recognized that solving the existing major transboundary environmental problems will be important in realizing the potential for broader cooperation in the Region. The Participants stated that the risk of contamination of the environment of the Region by radioactive substances is a serious problem and must be solved, inter alia, through international cooperation and the improvement of technology for the handling, storage and disposal of radioactive waste and the operational safety of nuclear facilities.

220 APPENDICES THE PARTICIPANTS NOTED THE IMPORTANCE OF INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION IN THE FOLLOWING AREAS: • expanded monitoring of ecology and radioactivity in the Region; • enhanced work on the operational safety of nuclear facilities; • rehabilitation of areas that have been polluted as a result of the operation of nuclear facilities. The Participants emphasized that in particular instances, such as for measures to improve nuclear safety and to reduce air polluting emissions from the nickel production on the Kola Peninsula, international financial arrangements in addition to national financial contributions may be considered with a view to finding cost-effective solutions. ECONOMIC COOPERATION The Participants recognized the importance of increased economic cooperation in the Region in the form of trade, investment, industrial cooperation, etc. In view of the environmentally vulnerable character of the Region, they stressed the particular importance of observing the provisions of the Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context (the EIA Convention), signed on 25 February, 1991, and the principles of environmental soundness and sustainability in all fields of economic cooperation. The Participants agreed to explore ways and means to encourage trade and investment and to provide a framework conducive to broader cooperation on a commercial basis at the enterprise level. The Participants recognized the potential for development in the Region in the field of energy on an environmentally sound basis. They underlined the importance of cooperation with regard to energy saving measures. The Participants recognised the role of the European Energy Charter in making the fundamental link between energy, the environment and economic development. The Participants recommended that conditions be created for enhanced cooperation in the conversion of military industries and facilities, inter alia, on a commercial basis. The Participants agreed to cooperate in developing the efficiency of agricultural production in Arctic and Sub-Arctic areas, inter alia, in order to secure sufficient supplies of food of high quality. In view of the similar climatic conditions in the Region, the Participants underlined the importance of exchanging experience and skills within the area in fields such as reindeer husbandry and forestry.

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SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL COOPERATION The Participants recognized the importance of scientific and technological cooperation in dealing with the Region's problems, including the promotion of relevant cold climate technologies. They noted the opportunities that exist for such cooperation in fields related to geology, oceanography, atmospheric physics, ecology and environmental protection, and technological fields such as construction, fisheries, aquaculture, forestry, mining, off-shore technology and transportation and communications applicable to the specific regional conditions. The Participants emphasized the need to exchange relevant experience and information and encourage the transfer of technologies. They proposed that taskforce laboratories, expeditions and the like, be set up to pursue specific projects and scientific programmes. The Participants stressed the role that the International Arctic Science Committee could play in developing scientific research. The Participants recognized the importance of cooperation in the training of personnel. REGIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE The Participants underlined the importance of improving the infrastructure for transport and communications in the Region. The Participants noted studies and discussions already initiated at the bilateral and multilateral level regarding the transport and communications needs of the Region and possible action to meet those needs. The Participants urged that preliminary and final results from such studies and discussions should be made available as appropriate to all participating states in order to avoid duplication of effort. The Participants decided to ask the ministers responsible for transport and communications to consider possibilities for cooperation, based, inter alia, on studies already in progress, on the transport and communications needs of the Region. The Participants expressed recognition of the progress already achieved through bilateral cooperation in the development of telecommunications and voiced support for further efforts on both a bilateral and a multilateral basis for the continued improvement of telecommunications in the Region. INDIGENOUS PEOPLES The Participants concerned reaffirmed their commitment to the rights of their indigenous peoples in the North in keeping with the objectives set out in Chapter 26 on Indigenous People of Agenda 21. They stated their

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commitment to strengthen the indigenous communities of the Region, and to ensure that the cooperation now being initiated will take the interests of indigenous peoples into consideration. The Participants concerned took note of the proposed establishment of a Working Group for Indigenous Issues with representatives from the indigenous peoples and authorities and the central authorities from Finland, Norway, Russia and Sweden. They agreed that the Working Group might consider, also on the basis of international cultural expeditions to areas of Nenets and Sami, preparing a regional programme for the restoration and preservation of Nenets and Sami cultural monuments, the establishment on a regional basis of a Nenets cultural centre in the Nenets Autonomous Region, the establishment of a corresponding Sami centre in the town of Lovozero in the county of Murmansk, and the establishment of an appropriate regional medical foundation. The Participants agreed to exchange information regarding existing or proposed legislation with a bearing on the position of indigenous peoples in their respective countries. HUMAN CONTACTS AND CULTURAL RELATIONS The Participants stressed that wider human contacts and increased cultural cooperation in the Region should be encouraged to promote constructive cooperation and good neighbourly relations. Among the areas of cooperation which could be considered are: • More extensive exchange of youth, students, teachers and professors from high school to university levels, also within the fields of culture and sports. • Activities which could give women in the Region more opportunities for cooperation and exchange of experience. • Extended facilities for education and training in the languages of the Region. • Cultural centres such as the planned "Pomor Cultural Centre" attached to Pomor State University in Archangel. TOURISM The Participants recognized that tourism may play a more important part in the economy of the Region and agreed that the promotion of tourism across national borders will strengthen human contacts and mutually beneficial economic development with positive effects for employment and business activities. They called for steps to encourage cooperation in the field of tourism at national, regional and local levels, and for common efforts to develop tourism infrastructure and facilities. The provisions of the EIA Convention should be duly taken into account in this context.

Index

Adjacent Areas Cooperation: BEAR and, 67, 139; central concern of, 70n. 36; expansion plans for, 107; funding from, 140; Russian collaboration with, 92, 155 Agenda formation stage, 2-3, 5, 6-11, 194; cognitive forces and, 21-22, 169, 170; context for, 24, 174; design perspectives and, 25-26, 177, 178; discourse control in, 196-97; "hard"/ "soft" law distinctions and, 180; intellectual leadership and, 23, 172; miscommunication in, 172; mistiming in, 195; research on, 189; tactics in, 25, 175, 176; variant visions in, 23-24 Agreement on Arctic Cooperation (1988), 33 Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears (1973), 16,31 Alaska, 31, 34, 76, 150 Alliance of Small Island States, 107 All-Russian Research Institute for Nature Protection, 144, 160 Amagoalik, John, 159n. 59 AMAP Assessment Report, 39 Andersen, Rolf Trolle, 75 Antarctic regions, 27; environmental advocacy for, 48, 75; ozone hole over, 7, 34, 188; SCAR and, 35 Antarctic Treaty (1959), 31, 50, 131 Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings, 131 Antarctic Treaty System, 30 Arctic and Antarctic Commission (Russia), 160 Arctic Basin, 38 Arctic Biodiversity Strategy, 155 Arctic Council: AEPS and, 13In. 11; establishment of, 27, 33, 154, 158; marginalizing of, 51; NGOs and, 193;

operationalization of, 199; potential of, 49-50; purposes of, 33-34 Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, 7-8, 35-41; agenda formation for, 52-85, 170, 178, 196-97; Arctic Council and, 49; context for, 24, 174-75; day-to-day operation of, 168, 198; divergent constituencies of, 50; generalization from, 179-82; information for, 13; negotiation phase of, 86-120, 173, 175, 176, 178; nonstate actors and, 10, 14-15, 37, 48, 171; operationalization of, 19-20, 122-67, 175; practical implications of, 195-98; text of, 202-16; theoretical implications of, 183-88; typicality of, 3-4; working groups of, 17-18. See also Working Group entries Arctic haze, 38, 56 Arctic Leaders' Summit, 34, 47 Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme: All-Russian Research Institute for Nature Protection and, 159; EMEP and, 18, 39, 133, 135, 136, 137; establishment of, 18, 106; functions of, 39; lead state of, 101; NEFCO and, 142n. 29; operationalization of, 125-26, 127, 131-36, 150, 166, 175, 177, 196; preparations for, 195, 198; report expenses of, 165; text of, 210-12; U.S. funds for, 152, 162-63 Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme Secretariat, 134-35, 136, 151, 190n. 31 Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Task Force, 127, 133-34, 155 Arctic Network, 48, 153, 193 Arnaudo, Ray, 48n. 58, 164 Arvesen, Jan, 164

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INDEX

Association of Indigenous Minorities of the North, Siberia and the Far East of the Russian Federation, 34 Audubon Society, 47, 153 162 Baffin Bay, 33 Baltic Sea, 78 Baltic Sea region, 98, 107, 175 Bangay, Garth, 111, 119, 194, 197 Barents Euro-Arctic Council, 44-45, 85; chairmanship of, 155; comparative neglect of, 126; coordination with, 138; establishment of, 18; expectations for, 68; joint meeting of, 130; operationalization of, 129; Saami and, 92; secretariat for, 139 Barents Euro-Arctic Region, 7-8, 9, 41-46; agenda formation for, 52-85, 170, 173, 177, 196-97; Arctic Council and, 49, 50; context for, 24, 17475; day-to-day operation of, 168, 198; divergent constituencies of, 50; generalization from, 179-83; individual leadership for, 172; marine issues and, 10; Native peoples of, 51; negotiation phase of, 86-120, 173, 175, 176, 178; new political order and, 13; NGOs and, 171; operationalization of, 20, 122-67, 175; practical implications of, 195-98; theoretical implications of, 183-88; typicality of, 3-4; working groups of, 18 Barents Programme, 140-41; adoption of, 130; financial issues and, 45, 124; implementation of, 177, 181-82; Nordic Council of Ministers and, 140; potential projects of, 129; Regional Council and, 138, 167, 193; Russian regional governments and, 160-61; subnational governments and, 171-72 Barents Regional Council, 44, 45, 85, 166-67; committees of, 140; coordination with, 138; establishment of, 18; expectations for, 68; joint meeting of, 130; membership of, 110; operationalization of, 126, 129; program development by, 171-72, 193; Saami and, 93 Barents Region Commission (Russia), 160 Barents Sea: fisheries of, 33, 42; radioactive wastes in, 48, 63; strategic weapons in, 67; sunken submarine in, 55

Barents Secretariat, 139, 151 Barlund, Kaj, 88 Beesley, J. Alan, 88, 89, 111, 119, 197 Bellona (organization), 166 Bering Sea, 47 Bering Sea region, 199 Berlin Wall, 175 Blomberg, Jaakko, 73 Bohlen, Curtis, 110 Brezhnev, Leonid, 58 Britain, 89, 90, 92, 115 Brodin, Gunnar, 139 Brundtland, Gro Harlem, 59 Brundtland Commission, 59, 157, 18In. 17 Bush, George, 25, 79 Bush administration, 25, 11 On. 45 Canada: AMAP and, 134, 136; Arctic Eight concept and, 70; bilateral agreements of, 33; CAFF and, 39, 127, 136, 153; early support by, 74, 173, 176; Inuit of, 34, 76; Kirkenes meeting and, 92, 113; Marine Environmental Cooperation Agreement and, 33; NATO membership of, 31; "northernness" of, 47; operationalization by, 20, 144, 146, 149, 157-59, 165; raw materials for, 44; Rovaniemi process and, 106, 107, 113; wildlife concerns of, 8, 62, 66, 96, 104 Canadian Initiative. See Arctic Council Center for International Environmental Law, 110 Chechnya, 161 Chernobyl accident (1986), 36, 54, 71, 78 China, 35 Chukotka, 76 Clinton administration, 25, 162, 166 Collective-action problems, 23-24, 172-74 Commander Islands, 30 Committee of Senior Officials, 129 Committee on Regions, 114n. 54 Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 45 Conference of the Parties, 17 Conference on Environment and Development (1992), 40, 47 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 44, 58, 91, 109 Conflicts of interest, 196

Index Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna Working Group, 39, 127-28, 136, 150, 153 Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna Working Group Secretariat, 131n. 12 Constitutive arguments, 185 Constructivist arguments, 185 Context, 24-25, 174-75, 188 Convention on Biological Diversity (1992), 25 Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (1979), 4, 58. See also Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution Regime Convention on Polar Bears (1973), HOn. 45 Convention on the Law of the Sea. See United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982) Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area (1992), 78, 79 Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities (1988), 5, 16, 171 Davis Strait, 33 Declaration of the Establishment of the Arctic Council (1996), 27, 33, 49 Declaration on Cooperation in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region. See Kirkenes Declaration (1993) Declaration on the Protection of the Arctic Environment. See Rovaniemi Declaration (1991) Denmark: AMAP and, 136; indigenous peoples and, 76; Kirkenes Declaration and, 115; Kirkenes meeting and, 92; Marine Environmental Cooperation Agreement and, 33; NATO membership of, 31, 60-61 Design perspectives, 25-27, 177-79 Driving forces, 21-22, 169-71 Edmar, Desiree, 88, 89, 111, 119, 164, 194, 197 Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response in the Arctic Working Group, 39, 106, 128, 129, 137 Environmental Defense Fund, 47, 110, 153,162

225

Environmental Monitoring and Evaluation Programme, 39, 133, 137; methodological challenges to, 135; Norwegian support of, 18; superiority of, 136 Epistemic communities, 186-87 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 138, 141, 152 European Community, 56, 61 European Community Commission, 41, 92, 107, 115 European Economic Community, 44 European Union: administrative center of, 78; Barents Council and, 45; BEAR and, 44, 64, 67, 141-42; context formed by, 24, 71; funding by, 152; growth of, 60, 81, 93; Nordic members of, 139, 141, 156; transition to, 61 Exxon Valdez (supertanker), 39, 55, 71, 78,83 "Failed states," 9 Faroe Islands, 33 Federal Republic of Germany, 89, 90 Finland: AMAP and, 136; Barents Council and, 44, 130; Barents Programme and, 141; EC application of, 56; EU membership of, 44, 139, 142; Murmansk initiative and, 172-73, 174; neutrality of, 61; North Calotte concept and, 65, 69-70, 74-75, 173; operationalization by, 146, 147, 149, 154-56, 163, 164, 165; Regional Council and, 138-39; transboundary pollutant fluxes and, 8, 36, 54, 58, 62, 63, 104, 115 Finnish Barents Group, 152, 155-56 Finnish Initiative. See Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy; Rovaniemi Declaration (1991) Flotten, Erling, 91, 109, 112, 138, 139 Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992), 5, 17, 178n. 16, 190 France, 92, 115 Fridtjof Nansen Institute, 92, 195 Friends of the Earth (organization), 110 "From North Calotte to Great Calotte" (seminar), 92 Geneva Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution. See Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (1979)

226

INDEX

Geopolitics, 180 Germany: Fennoscandia and, 60; international cooperation and, 64; Kirkenes meeting and, 92, 115; Nordic states and, 44, 61; transboundary air pollution and, 74. See also Federal Republic of Germany Gorbachev, Mikhail: Murmansk initiative of, 32, 54, 58, 114, 173, 174, 188; reforms of, 83 Great Britain, 89, 90, 92, 115 Great Calotte, 140, 173, 197 Greenland, 31, 32, 33, 34, 76 Greenpeace (organization), 47-48, 166, 193 Gronberg, Tom, 89, 111, 119, 194, 197 Group of 77, 107 Gulf War (1990), 79, 90, 116, 120, 175 Hajost, Scott, 153n. 49 Hegemonic stability theory, 2 Helms, Hans Jakob, 76n. 51 Helsinki Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area (1992), 78, 79 Hoist, Johan J0rgen, 130, 143, 164 Iceland, 31, 33, 88,92, 115 Indigenous peoples' organizations, 193 Indigenous Peoples Secretariat, 40-41, 110, 127 Individual leadership, 22-23, 172, 193-94, 197-98 Institutional bargaining: entrepreneurial techniques and, 15; negotiation stage and, 12, 13, 14, 22, 24; operationalization stage and, 20; research on, 189 Institutional design, 25-27, 177-79 Interagency Arctic Policy Group (U.S.), 149, 162, 167 Interagency Commission on Arctic and Antarctic Affairs (Russia), 160, 167 Interagency Commission on the Barents Region (Russia), 143, 146, 160, 167 Interests, 185-86, 192. See also Conflicts of interest Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Climate Change, 5, 17, 178n. 16 International Arctic Programme (World Wide Fund for Nature), 47 International Arctic Science Committee, 34-35,63,90, 116, 135n. 19

International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), 138, 141, 152 International Seabed Authority and Enterprise, 16-17 International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (World Conservation Union), 15n. 49, 17, 76, 193 Interreg Programme, 142 Inuit Circumpolar Conference, 34, 71, 76, 89, 90 Inuit Regional Conservation Strategy, 76 Jan Mayen, 33 Japan, 33, 35, 92, 115 Kara Sea, 48, 63 Karelia, 93, 115 Kirkenes Declaration (1993), 41; agenda formation and, 56; on cooperation, 42^3; Kozyrev and, 143, 160; negotiations preceding, 86-121, 195; silences of, 45; "soft" nature of, 180; substantive content of, 44; text of, 218-23 Kirkenes meeting (1993), 80, 126, 158n. 56 Kirkenes Secretariat: first head of, 129; legal personality and, 13In. 12; Nordic Council of Ministers and, 140; permanent staff of, 139; Swedish secretariat and, 45n. 48, 130 Klepsvik, Karsten, 129 Koh, Tommy Thong-Bee, 197 Kola Peninsula: Adjacent Areas Cooperation and, 70n. 36; infrastructure of, 50; sulfur dioxide emissions from, 8, 36,54,58,62, 104, 115 Komsomolets (submarine), 55 Kozyrev, Andre: Interagency Commission and, 143; Kirkenes Declaration and, 160; Stoltenberg and, 9, 54, 71, 75, 79, 82, 90-91, 109, 172, 194; support by, 173 Krasner, Stephen, 170 Kuramin, Vladimir, 160 Labor Party (Norway), 91 Lapland County (Finland), 42, 57, 59, 92n. 4 Lapland Environmental Center, 142n. 29

Index Law of the Sea Convention. See United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982) League of Nations Covenant, 16, 24 Lithuania, 116 Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution Regime: AEPS and, 3, 8, 13, 38, 86, 131, 187; AMAP and, 197; EMEP and, 18, 133, 136; establishment of, 58; Scandinavia and, 66, 69; sulfur protocol to, 97, 182. See also Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (1979) Lynge, Finn, 76n. 51 Maastricht Treaty (1992), 56, 78n. 54, 114 Marine Environmental Cooperation Agreement (1983), 33 McKersie, Robert B., 94 Ministerial Conference on the Protection of the Arctic Environment (1991), 90 Mongolia, 35 Montreal Protocol (1987), 182, 188 Mulroney, Brian, 158 Multivariate analysis, 2 National Audubon Society, 47, 153, 162 NATO, 31, 36, 60-61 Nature/nurture debate, 189-90 Negotiation stage, 2-3, 5, 11-15; agenda formation overlap with, 9-10, 194; design perspectives and, 25, 177, 178; exogenous change and, 174; gridlock in, 24, 173; "hard'V'soft" law distinctions and, 180-81; individual entrepreneurship and, 23, 171; interests in, 22, 169, 170; issue redefinition in, 6; mistiming in, 195; operationalization and, 20; research on, 189-90; skills for, 197; tactics in, 25, 175 Nongovernmental organizations, 192-93 Nordic Council of Ministers, 70n. 36, 75, 92, 137, 139-40, 155 Nordic Environmental Finance Corporation, 138, 141, 142n. 29 Nordic Saami Council, 90. See also Saami Council Norrbotten, 42, 59 North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission, 33

227

North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 31, 36,60-61 North Calotte: Adjacent Areas Cooperation in, 67; BEAR concept and, 114, 177, 184; Finnish sensitivities to, 65, 69-70, 74-75, 173; Great Calotte concept and, 140, 197; Nordic policies on, 31-32 North Calotte Committee, 70n. 36, 75, 92, 107, 139, 155 Northern Forum, 35, 116 Northern Sea Route, 32 Norway: AMAP and, 18, 39, 101, 106, 136; AMAP Secretariat and, 39, 127, 131, 134-35; Barents Council and, 44, 129, 130, 140; bilateral agreements of, 33; counties of, 41, 59, 91, 149, 157; EU and, 139, 141-42; NATO membership of, 31, 60-61; operationalization by, 20, 143-44, 146, 149-50, 156-57, 163, 164; Regional Council and, 45, 129, 139, 140; shipyards of, 50; Tromso conference and, 54 Norwegian Initiative. See Barents EuroArctic Region Norwegian Sea, 42 Nunavut Implementation Commission, 159n. 59 Nunavut Territory, 159, 165 Operationalization stage, 2-3, 5, 15-20, 194; asymmetries in, 24, 172, 173-74; design perspectives and, 26, 177, 17879; domestic developments and, 2425, 174; nonstate actors and, 22-23, 171; power and, 169-70; programmatic arrangements and, 180; research on, 190-91, 198; tactics in, 25, 175, 177 Oslo group, 190 Our Common Future, 59, 18In. 17 Persian Gulf War (1990), 79, 90, 116, 120, 175 Pettersen, Oddrunn, 129, 139, 151 Point Barrow, 38 Poland, 90, 92 Polar Bear Specialist Group, 16 Polar Commission (Canada), 167 Polar Commission (Finland), 149, 156 Pomor traders, 59, 77

228

INDEX

Power, 183-85 Preparedness, 195 Pribilof Islands, 30 Prince William Sound, 39 Programme of Action for Eastern Europe, 141 Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment Working Group. See Working Group on the Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment Rajakoski, Esko, 82, 194; chairmanship of, 88; entrepreneurial leadership of, 72-73; northern origins of, 58; political momentum and, 80; Rovaniemi Declaration and, 35; Stenseth and, 62, 75; supported solicited by, 176 Reagan, Ronald, 25 Regional Council. See Barents Regional Council Reierson, Lars-Otto, 127, 134 Riker, William H., 52, 83 Rittberger, Volker, 100 Rovaniemi Declaration (1991): AMAP operationalization and, 126, 195; on anthropogenic pollutants, 133; expectations for, 41; on government representatives, 36; LRTAP and, 187; on ministerial meetings, 128; nonstate actor issue and, 85; press announcement of, 54; programmatic initiatives of, 127; signing of, 35, 159; "soft" nature of, 37, 180; text of, 200-201 Rovaniemi meeting (1989), 76n. 51, 77, 80, 81, 197 Rovaniemi process, 35, 86-120; exogenous events and, 175; Exxon Valdez and, 78; Finnish invitation and, 81; nonstate actors and, 10; OMB and, 161; SAAOs and, 128; shaping of, 38 Russian Federation: Adjacent Areas Cooperation and, 92; AMAP and, 136; asymmetry problem and, 174; Barents Programme and, 141; bureaucratic politics in, 150, 160; corporate reconstruction of, 151, 156; coup attempt in, 120, 159; domestic turmoil in, 39, 81, 161, 175; early support by, 74; economic interests of, 44, 104, 116; elections in, 45, 75; establishment of, 79; Fennoscandia and, 3, 59, 62; fishers of, 50, 77; foreign

investment in, 6, 145; foreign ministers of, 80; Great Calotte and, 140n. 25; indigenous peoples of, 76; Inuit of, 34; joint declaration of, 91; NAMMCO and, 33; naval forces of, 43; Nordic Council of Ministers and, 154; "northernness" of, 46-47; Norway and, 107, 108, 113, 176, 184, 192; oil spills in, 56-57, 78; operationalization by, 20, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149, 159-61, 163, 175; political integration of, 61, 67, 86, 156, 169; radioactive contamination in, 40, 48, 60, 63, 78, 152, 162; Stoltenberg and, 73, 90, 93, 112, 173, 175; strengthening of, 111; submarines of, 137; subnational governments of, 42, 51, 91, 186; TACIS and, 141; Tromso conference and, 54; Western funds and, 66, 165, 184. See also Soviet Union Saami, 54, 76, 77, 92-93, 110 Saami Council, 34, 71. See also Nordic Saami Council SALT II agreement (1979), 16 Schelling, Thomas, 94, 176 Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, 35 Senior Arctic Affairs Officials, 40, 127, 128, 129, 131 Sisula, Heikki, 127, 155 "Soft" law, 3, 179; growing reliance on, 18; implementation of, 17; operationalization and, 180; successful instances of, 12 Soviet collapse: agenda formation and, 83; context formed by, 24, 55, 71, 116, 188; economic aspects of, 147; European democracies and, 7; Fennoscandia and, 60; Finnish trade and, 155; international cooperation and, 32, 36, 43, 64, 109, 119, 174; nonstate activism and, 47; northern Europe and, 3; Norwegian foreign policy and, 81, 113; operationalization issues and, 165 Soviet Union: Arctic Eight concept and, 70; Cold War barrier and, 31; determination by, 176; Finland and, 57; Murmansk initiative and, 58; NATO vs., 60-61; Norwegian fisheries agreements with, 33; Rovaniemi process

Index Soviet Union (cont.) and, 106, 107; SALT II and, 16; Western interaction with, 72. See also Russian Federation Spitsbergen Treaty (1920), 30-31 "State of the Arctic Environment Report": costs of, 165; data collection for, 145; national inputs for, 166; priority of, 127, 134; responsibility for, 39 Stenseth, Dagfinn, 62, 75, 82 Stoltenberg, Thorvald, 41, 157, 181, 194; creativity of, 43; delays by, 195; design perspectives and, 178; entrepreneurial role of, 112, 119; Flotten and, 109, 112, 138, 139; Fridtjof Nansen Institute and, 195; on Great Calotte, 140n. 25, 173, 197; Hoist and, 130, 143, 164; information dissemination by, 176-77; intellectual leadership of, 73, 111-12, 172; international interests and, 92, 115, 158n. 56; Klepsvik and, 129; Kozyrev and, 9, 54, 71, 75, 79, 82, 90-91, 109, 172, 194; operationalization and, 144, 164; promotion by, 62, 163, 188; resources released by, 170-71, 184; strategy of, 93; at Tromso meeting, 85; USSR-Russia transition and, 175 Stone, David, 127 Subnational governmental units, 193 Svalbard Archipelago, 30, 67 Sweden: AMAP and, 136; Baltic interests of, 107, 175; Barents Council and, 44; Barents Programme and, 141; bureaucratic politics in, 151; EC application of, 56; EU membership of, 44, 139, 142; Kirkenes Declaration and, 103, 113; neutrality of, 36, 61; NorwegianRussian deal and, 108; operationalization by, 20, 146, 174; Regional Council and, 45, 130, 138-39; Rovaniemi process and, 88, 90, 98, 106, 113, 183; Stoltenberg and, 93, 112, 115 Tactics, 25, 175-77 Task Force on Sustainable Development and Utilization, 40, 114n. 53, 127, 128-29; Canada and, 158; report by, 48n. 59 Technical Assistance to the Commonwealth of Independent States program, 142

229

Thompson, Jan, 164 Treaty for the Preservation and Protection of Fur Seals (1911), 30 Treaty of Maastricht (1992), 56, 78n. 54, 114 Treaty of Spitsbergen (1920), 30-31 Tubingen group, 100, 190 Underdal, Arild, 102 United Kingdom, 89, 90, 92, 115 United Nations, 89, 192 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992), 40, 47 United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (1973), 5 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982), 190; International Seabed Authority and Enterprise and, 16; negotiation of, 5; Preparatory Committee and, 178n. 16; time devoted to, 4; U.S. presidents and, 25 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 37, 88, 90 United Nations Environment Programme, 90 United States: AMAP and, 132n. 13, 134, 136, 150, 152, 162-63, 196; Arctic Eight concept and, 70; bilateral agreements of, 33; emergency concerns of, 66, 78, 96; EPPR and, 128; federal agencies of, 37, 144, 145-46, 147, 148, 161-62, 186; Finland and, 57, 174; global perspective of, 69, 81; Kirkenes meeting and, 92, 115; NATO membership of, 31; naval forces of, 43; NGOs in, 110, 153, 162; Nordic relations with, 61; operationalization by, 16, 18-19, 20, 144, 147-48, 149, 161-63, 166, 174, 175, 191; pollution concerns of, 62; presidential elections in, 25, 79; pressure on, 176, 183; raw materials for, 44; Rovaniemi process and, 38, 74, 80, 88, 90, 98, 103, 106-7, 108-9, 113, 115, 118,173, 183, 196; "soft" law arrangements and, 180; submarines of, 137; sustainable development issue and, 64 USSR Association of Small Peoples of the North, 90 Vayrynen, Paavo, 71 Vilnius confrontation (1991), 116, 120

230

INDEX

Walton, Richard E., 94 West Germany. See Federal Republic of Germany Whitby, Leslie, 164 White Sea, 42 Wilderness Society, 162 Working Group on Arctic International Relations, 114n. 52 Working Group on Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response in the Arctic, 39, 106, 128, 129, 137 Working Group on the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna, 39, 127-28, 136, 150, 153 Working Group on the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna Secretariat, 131n. 12 Working Group on the Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment: operationalization of, 40, 126, 128, 129, 137; Sweden and, 106

World Bank, 138, 141, 152 World Commission on Environment and Development, 59, 157, 181n. 17 World Conservation Strategy, 76 World Conservation Union, 16, 76, 153n. 49, 193 World Wide Fund for Nature, 76n. 48, 193 World Wide Fund for Nature International Arctic Programme, 47n. 54 World Wildlife Fund, HOn. 45, 153, 162 Yeltsin, Boris: BEAR and, 91, 109; parliamentary crisis and, 116, 175; reelection of, 45; sovereignty established by, 79 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, 45 Zhuravlev, Sergei, 111, 119 Ziirn, Michael, 100 Zyuganov, Gennadi, 45