How the Arctic Council Governs a Warming Region

The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, at something close to four times the global average, and the consequences are arriving quickly: retreating sea ice, thawing permafrost, shifting fish stocks, and newly navigable shipping routes across an ocean that was until recently frozen shut. Governing that change is unusually complicated, because the Arctic is not a single territory but an ocean surrounded by eight sovereign states, home to Indigenous peoples who have lived there for millennia, and increasingly of interest to countries with no Arctic coastline at all. The institution at the centre of this is the Arctic Council, established in 1996 and often described as the primary forum for circumpolar cooperation. Understanding what it is, and just as importantly what it is not, is essential to understanding how the region is actually managed. Here is how it works, step by step.

 

1. Eight Arctic States Lead

 

The Council's members are the eight states with territory above the Arctic Circle: Canada, the Kingdom of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States. It was created by the 1996 Ottawa Declaration as a high-level intergovernmental forum focused on cooperation, environmental protection, and sustainable development.

Two features of its founding are worth noting because they still shape everything it does. The first is that the Ottawa Declaration explicitly excludes military security from the Council's mandate, a deliberate choice that allowed cooperation to proceed between former Cold War adversaries by walling off the most contentious subject. The second is that the Council is a forum rather than a treaty organisation. It was established by declaration rather than by treaty, which means it has no independent legal personality of its own, cannot legislate, and depends entirely on its members choosing to act.

 

2. Indigenous Peoples Have a Formal Voice

 

Six Indigenous organisations hold Permanent Participant status: the Aleut International Association, the Arctic Athabaskan Council, the Gwich'in Council International, the Inuit Circumpolar Council, the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North, and the Saami Council. They are entitled to full consultation and active involvement in all Council negotiations and decisions.

This is the Arctic Council's most genuinely innovative feature and the thing that most distinguishes it from other international bodies. Indigenous organisations are not observers or advisers here; they sit at the table alongside states, and the category was created specifically for them. Roughly four million people live in the Arctic, a substantial proportion of them Indigenous, and the traditional and local knowledge they contribute has become a formal input to Council assessments alongside conventional science. The status stops short of a vote, since decisions rest with the eight states, but the requirement of full consultation gives the Permanent Participants real influence over what the Council says and does, and it has been widely cited as a model for Indigenous participation in international governance.

 

3. Science Drives the Process

 

The Council's core output is knowledge. Its expert bodies collect data, run assessments, and evaluate issues including climate change, pollution, biodiversity, and the state of Arctic ecosystems. This is what the Council does better than anything else, and its assessments have repeatedly changed the global conversation.

Two examples illustrate the point. Work on persistent organic pollutants documented how contaminants generated in industrial regions accumulate in Arctic food webs and in the bodies of Indigenous people who rely on traditional diets, evidence that fed directly into the negotiation of the Stockholm Convention. The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, published in 2004, was among the earliest comprehensive regional climate assessments and brought international attention to how fast the region was changing. The Council's power, in other words, has generally been the power of establishing facts that other institutions then have to act on.

 

4. Six Working Groups Do the Technical Work

 

The technical work is distributed across six standing working groups covering, broadly, contaminants and pollution, environmental monitoring and assessment, biodiversity conservation, emergency prevention preparedness and response, marine environment protection, and sustainable development. These groups are where scientists, officials, and Permanent Participant representatives from across the region actually collaborate, running projects over multi-year cycles.

The working groups are the Council's engine and, in difficult periods, its lifeline. They operate at a technical level somewhat insulated from high politics, which has meant that when ministerial-level cooperation became impossible, expert-level work could continue in a limited form. The Council approved a work plan of 41 projects for the 2025 to 2027 period, which was notable as the first announcement of new Arctic Council projects since February 2022, for reasons the later sections explain.

 

5. Countries Decide by Consensus

 

All Arctic Council decisions and statements require consensus among the eight member states, with the Permanent Participants fully consulted throughout.

Consensus is both the Council's foundation and its constraint, and the trade-off is familiar from other international bodies. It guarantees that nothing is imposed on any member, which is precisely what made cooperation possible between states with deep disagreements elsewhere. It also means any single member can prevent the Council from saying anything at all. The consequence became visible in 2019, when a ministerial meeting in Rovaniemi ended without a joint declaration for the first time in the Council's history, following disagreement over language on climate change. When the members agree, consensus produces genuine legitimacy. When they do not, it produces silence.

 

6. Recommendations Become Policy Guidance

 

Assessments and traditional knowledge are translated into policy recommendations, guidelines, and best practices addressed to Arctic governments and other decision-makers. This is the Council's characteristic output: not law, but authoritative advice.

The influence of such advice should not be dismissed, because it works through channels other than compulsion. Council assessments shape national policy, feed into other international negotiations, inform industry standards, and establish a shared factual baseline that makes subsequent agreement easier. The International Maritime Organization's Polar Code, which sets binding rules for ships operating in polar waters, drew on Arctic Council work even though the Council itself could not have enacted it. Soft power of this kind is slower and less certain than regulation, but in a region where no single authority could impose rules anyway, it has often been the only realistic route.

 

7. Treaties Turn Cooperation Into Action

 

On three occasions, cooperation within the Council has produced legally binding agreements negotiated among the eight states: the 2011 agreement on aeronautical and maritime search and rescue, the 2013 agreement on marine oil pollution preparedness and response, and the 2017 agreement on enhancing international Arctic scientific cooperation.

The legal distinction matters and is often misunderstood. These treaties were negotiated under the Council's auspices but are agreements between the states themselves, not instruments of the Council, which has no power to conclude treaties. It is also telling which subjects made the cut. Search and rescue, oil spill response, and scientific access are all areas of practical, shared, low-controversy interest, where every party benefits from cooperation and none loses. That is the space in which the Arctic Council has been able to convert dialogue into binding obligation, and it is a narrow one.

 

8. It Does Not Govern Like a Government

 

Despite the framing of the question, the Arctic Council does not govern the Arctic. It is a cooperation forum, not a supranational authority. It does not make law, does not replace national governments, and cannot enforce its recommendations. Implementation rests with the Arctic States individually and with other international bodies such as the International Maritime Organization, the International Seabed Authority, and the institutions of the law of the sea.

Recognising this is the key to assessing the Council fairly. Much of the criticism directed at it amounts to disappointment that it has not done things it was never constituted to do. Fisheries in the central Arctic Ocean, for instance, are governed by a separate 2018 agreement among ten parties including non-Arctic states, not by the Council. Maritime boundaries and extended continental shelf claims are handled under UNCLOS. Shipping rules come from the IMO. The Council's actual function is to generate shared knowledge, build habits of cooperation, and give Indigenous peoples a formal seat, and by those measures it has been considerably more successful than its lack of formal power might suggest.

 

The Council Under Strain

 

No honest account of the Arctic Council today can omit what has happened to it since 2022. Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the other seven member states announced on 3 March 2022 that they would pause their participation, and the Council's work stopped for the first time in its history. Russia, which then held the chairship, continued it alone. Limited technical work resumed in 2022 and 2023 under agreed guidelines, and by the second half of 2024 all six working groups were meeting again, though virtually. Russia's foreign ministry confirmed in January 2025 that it had partially resumed participation.

Norway's chairship from 2023 to 2025 is widely credited with holding the institution together, and its stated objective was simply to keep the Council intact with all eight members and get its work restarted. On 12 May 2025 the chairship passed to the Kingdom of Denmark for the 2025 to 2027 term, at a fourteenth ministerial meeting held virtually and behind closed doors. Greenland has taken an unusually prominent role in this chairship, with Greenland's first Arctic Ambassador, Kenneth Høegh, serving as Chair of Senior Arctic Officials. Sweden is due to take over in 2027.

The Council survives, then, but in a diminished form. There have been no in-person ministerial or senior officials meetings since 2022, the prohibition on in-person working group meetings has hampered project delivery, and the ban on military security in the Council's mandate means the forum has no way of addressing the rising strategic tension in the region. Analysts have described the Danish chairship as facing an unusually difficult balancing act, with political pressure on Arctic cooperation now coming from more than one direction. What has not happened is collapse. No member has left, and none has proposed abandoning the Council, which in the circumstances is a meaningful achievement in itself. Whether an institution built on consensus and designed to set politics aside can function in a period when politics refuses to be set aside is the open question of the next few years.

 

Did You Know?

 

The Arctic Council currently operates under the Kingdom of Denmark's 2025 to 2027 chairship, comprising Denmark, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands, while the region it covers undergoes some of the fastest environmental change on the planet. The contrast between the pace of that change and the pace of the institution responding to it is stark: the Arctic is warming at roughly four times the global rate, sea ice is retreating in ways that are opening entirely new shipping routes and resource frontiers, and yet the Council has not held an in-person ministerial meeting since 2022. It remains the only forum where all eight Arctic states and six Indigenous peoples' organisations sit down together, which is precisely why so much effort has gone into keeping it alive even when it could barely function.

 

Note: This article reflects the state of the Arctic Council as of mid-2026, drawing on sources including the Arctic Council and its Secretariat, the Norwegian and Danish governments, the Arctic Institute, and the Belfer Center. The Council's operating status has changed repeatedly since 2022 and continues to evolve.