Til baka

Introduction

The 1996 Ottawa Declaration on the Establishment of the Arctic Council calls upon the newly-created council to act as a "high level forum" that will both carry on the work relating to environmental protection initiated under the auspices of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) and add to this effort a new "sustainable development program." Despite the "commitment to sustainable development in the Arctic region" articulated in the declaration, however, the Arctic Council (AC) remains at sea regarding the scope and content of its sustainable development program. Two years after its creation, the council has succeeded only in formulating a set of "terms of reference" that are largely procedural and that offer no guidance regarding the overall character or the substantive priorities of a sustainable development program for the Arctic. What are we to make of this situation? What can we do at this juncture to devise a constructive role for the council as a player in efforts to make progress toward fulfilling the goal of achieving sustainable development in the Arctic?

In this essay, I argue that we need to create an Arctic Sustainable Development Strategy (ASDS) to provide a basis for the activities of the council in this field in much the same way that the AEPS provided a basis for the development of a flourishing environmental protection program under terms of the 1991 Rovaniemi Declaration on the Protection of the Arctic Environment. The AEPS is a substantial document developed during the course of the negotiations culminating in the Rovaniemi Declaration and designed to spell out the rationale for a "joint Action Plan" including four distinct program elements: the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) and the Working Groups on the Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment (PAME), Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response (EPPR), and the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF). Formally, the AEPS is not a part of the Rovaniemi Declaration. Yet the declaration states that the signatories "adopt the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy and commit [themselves] to take steps towards its implementation and consider its further elaboration." As a result, the AEPS emerged as a kind of constitution for what is today the environmental protection program of the Arctic Council. In retrospect, it is difficult to imagine how this program could have acquired a distinct identity and performed so well in the absence of such an agreed upon strategy setting programmatic priorities and framing the discourse to be used in the pursuit of these priorities.

For its part, the Ottawa Declaration calls on the Arctic Council to "oversee and coordinate a sustainable development program" treated as an addition to the activities already underway as elements of the environmental protection program now reconfirmed as an activity of the council. But the declaration is not accompanied by a strategy document or, in other words, an Arctic Sustainable Development Strategy (ASDS) capable of standing alongside the AEPS and giving direction to the new sustainable development program. The goal of this essay is to initiate a dialogue about ways to fill this gap. To this end, it begins with some general observations about the concept of sustainable development and proceeds to an account of particular challenges relating to sustainability arising in the Arctic today. Building on this foundation, the essay proceeds to identify four substantive themes that, taken together, could form the programmatic priorities of an ASDS. The conclusion suggests a process through which the contents of an ASDS can be fleshed out during the near future.

Sustainable development is not a variable that can be measured in terms of a single, well-defined index, such as gross national product (GNP) or even quality of life (QOL). Rather, it is an analytic framework intended to provide a basis for systematic thinking about human/environment relations. Should this framework prove successful, it would take its place alongside other influential analytic constructs, such as microeconomics as a way of thinking about the production and consumption of goods and services through the operation of markets and ecosystems analysis as a way of thinking about interdependencies among assemblages of organisms and their habitats. Even so, we need an overall definition of sustainable development as a point of departure for examining the options available to the Arctic Council as it seeks to flesh out the contents of its sustainable development program. We may say, then, that sustainable development is a condition in which activities that enhance human welfare do so without destroying or degrading existing biogeophysical systems or cultural systems.

The accent here is on development, a fact that sets the discourse of sustainable development apart from many discussions of environmental protection, much less from perspectives that stress obligations of humans to act as stewards of physical and biological systems. There is no way to achieve sustainable development without granting priority to human concerns pertaining to health, education, and welfare. Yet, the addition of the adjective "sustainable" places critical limitations on the pursuit of human objectives. The essential puzzle is to find ways to enhance human welfare while at the same time safeguarding biogeophysical and cultural systems. One way to solve this puzzle is to place restrictions on the pursuit of material welfare, including standards that apply not only to the products humans consume but also to the processes involved in their production. Another - by no means mutually exclusive - response to the puzzle is to encourage people to pay increased attention to social, cultural, or intellectual welfare in contrast to material welfare. This approach centers on dematerialization in contrast to the first approach which seeks to reduce the biogeophysical and cultural destruction caused by the pursuit of material welfare.

In either case, it is helpful to distinguish between a strong version and a weak version of sustainable development. The strong version (1) embraces the precautionary principle in the sense of placing strict limits on the pursuit of material welfare in the face of uncertainty about its ecological and cultural consequences and (2) adopts the procedure known as reverse onus in the sense of requiring those pursuing projects in the name of development to demonstrate that they are sustainable rather than making opponents prove that they are unsustainable. The weak version, by contrast, allows development - in such forms as the harvesting of living resources or the extraction of nonrenewable resources - to go forward even in situations where it is not possible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the consequences will be ecologically and culturally benign. Which version of sustainable development is to be preferred? There is no correct answer to this question. The issue turns on value judgments as well as scientific assessments of the probable consequences of various streams of human activities. Individual human communities may arrive at different conclusions about this issue; the same community may change its position over the course of time. The best we can say is that this is an issue to be posed explicitly and addressed in a sensitive manner in settings such as the Arctic Council.

Some challenges or threats to sustainability are universal. No development strategy can enhance human welfare on a lasting basis, for instance, if it leads to serious problems of human health or destroys the resource base on which a society depends. Yet, many problems of sustainability are associated with regional or even local conditions, so that it becomes important to ask what is distinctive about any given region when it comes to the pursuit of sustainable development. In the case of the Arctic, the most distinctive circumstances can grouped into three broad categories: ecological conditions, social conditions, and cultural conditions.

While many have asserted that Arctic ecosystems are unusually fragile, there is no consensus on this proposition and certainly no generic index that would allow us to compare and contrast the Arctic with other regions in these terms. What we can say is that Arctic systems are slow to regenerate following serious disturbances, that the Arctic contains hot spots (e.g. areas of extreme concentrations of animals and other organisms) which are particularly susceptible to disturbances, that rates of biodegradation are extremely slow in the region, and that the Arctic is a sink in which airborne and waterborne contaminants accumulate and reside for long periods of time. As well, Arctic conditions are highly conducive to ecological cascades in the sense that specific events (e.g., human harvesting of key species) can trigger processes leading to non-linear changes. Together, these conditions make it important to adopt an ecosystems perspective in managing consumptive uses of living resources, to minimize the footprint of industrial facilities, and to focus on regulating the long-range transport of pollutants originating outside the region.

The social conditions relevant to sustainable development in the Arctic include problems associated with the delivery of municipal services in fixed, year-around communities located in areas underlain by permafrost, heavy dependence on financial resources flowing from distant governments, and sensitivity to a variety of outside forces that are controlled by decisionmakers who know little or nothing about the Arctic and have few incentives to be concerned about the welfare of its residents. The facts that more than half the budget of the Greenland Home Rule comes from Copenhagen and that an even larger proportion of the budgets of Canada's northern territories comes from Ottawa, for instance, make Arctic communities vulnerable to forces over which they have little control. Similar comments are in order about heavy dependence on markets (e.g., markets in seal products) subject to political manipulation on the part of outsiders or on industries (e.g., ecotourism) sensitive to rapid fluctuations in the habits and tastes of outsiders. Today's Arctic communities are neither self-sufficient nor in a position to exercise effective influence over the course of events in the outside world that often have far-reaching implications for their welfare.

Rapid cultural change is a fact of life throughout the Circumpolar North. The result is increasing acculturation for many and growing anomie leading to pathologies like alcoholism and suicide for others. The cultural systems of the Arctic, like those of other remote regions such as Amazonia, are increasingly at risk. What this means is that forms of development that may be perfectly sustainable in other parts of the world are likely to prove culturally unsustainable in the Arctic. Because cultural integrity is important not only as an end in itself but also as a condition affecting the sustainable use of natural resources, moreover, any strategy designed to promote sustainable development in the Arctic must pay particular attention to helping the region's permanent residents to find satisfactory ways to cope with rapid cultural change,

In thinking about sustainable development in a region like the Circumpolar North, it is helpful to draw a distinction between endogenous and exogenous threats to sustainability. Endogenous threats are those arising from activities occurring within the region itself - like excessive harvesting of living resources or the impacts of industrial facilities located in the Arctic - regardless of the motivations behind these activities. Exogenous threats, by contrast, are those associated with activities occurring outside the region which produce - often unforeseen and unintended - side effects within the region. Although both types of threats are important, the problems and prospects of addressing them in the interests of achieving sustainable development differ significantly. Coping with endogenous threats calls for actions aimed at regulating the behavior of various actors within the region; dealing with exogenous threats requires an effort to present the concerns of the region in outside forums.

There is no shortage of endogenous threats to sustainable development in the Arctic. These range from the depletion of valuable fish stocks, through the environmental and social impacts of hydrocarbon development, largescale mining, and hydroelectric power generation, and on to the ecological impacts of small cities - like Archangel, Murmansk, Norilsk, or Tromso - under Arctic conditions. Factors complicating the treatment of these endogenous problems include the fact that many users of Arctic resources are outside entities (e.g., British Petroleum, Exxon, or Cominco) whose survival is not dependent on their Arctic activities as well as the fact that many Arctic communities are maintained in part to serve political interests articulated by national governments, regardless of their sustainability in ecological or cultural terms. It follows that efforts to solve these endogenous problems of sustainability in the Arctic cannot succeed in the absence of a willingness on the part of outside policymakers and corporate decisionmakers to pay serious attention to the implications of their actions for sustainable development in the Arctic.

At the same time, the Arctic is unusually sensitive to exogenous threats to sustainable development. Partly, this is a matter of biogeophysical impacts on Arctic systems of actions originating elsewhere. Arctic haze caused largely by industrial production occurring outside the region is an annual event; seasonal increases in UV-B radiation resulting from the depletion of stratospheric ozone are a fact of life in the high latitudes. Climate change is expected to cause temperature changes in the Far North that are up to twice as large as those occurring in the mid-latitudes. The effects of persistent organic pollutants reaching the Arctic through long-range transport mechanisms have assumed serious proportions. The welfare of highly migratory birds and animals that spend part of each year outside the Arctic is heavily affected by pollution and habitat destruction in the mid-latitudes.

In part, exogenous threats to sustainable development in the Circumpolar North stem from the dominance of southern institutions and global processes centered in the South. To take a prominent example, economic globalization favors actors who are specialists in the sense that they have portable professions or trades which they can pursue wherever their work may take them. Most Arctic residents, by contrast, are generalists who are deeply attached to a particular place and are willing to engage in a diverse set of activities in order to make a living in their home area. An economy structured to meet the needs of specialists with regard to flows of trade, money, technology, and information will undermine the way of life of the generalist, unless there is some way to insulate areas populated by generalists from the shocks arising from globalization. Most often, generalists are left to their own devices or maintained as wards of the state. In either case, the result is incompatible with the requirements of sustainable development. Although the phrase is controversial, this is what many observers have in mind in speaking of core/periphery relations.

What is to be done about these threats to sustainable development in the Arctic? More specifically, what is the proper role for the Arctic Council in this realm? Achieving sustainable development in the Arctic will require a range of efforts articulated at a number of levels of social organization. Some problems, like dealing with waste disposal in small Arctic communities, are best dealt with at the local or state/provincial/county level. Others, such as the design and administration of systems of transfer payments intended to solve familiar problems of health, education, and welfare, need to be handled by regional or national governments. Still others, like controlling long-range transport mechanisms associated with the flow of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) into the Arctic, will require coordinated actions at the international level in which states located well beyond the confines of the Arctic take part.

Where does the comparative advantage of the Arctic Council lie in these terms? The council is a suitable vehicle for handling two types of issues relating to sustainable development in the Arctic. It can address issues that are regional in scope either because they involve problems transcending national boundaries or activities occurring beyond the jurisdiction of individual Arctic states (e.g., managing the Arctic's polar bear stocks, developing standards for navigation in Arctic waters) or because they involve issues recurring in much the same form throughout the region (e.g., devising methods for minimizing the impacts of industrial facilities), so that it makes sense to share experiences in the search for best available practices. Additionally, the council can play a role in aggregating Arctic interests and strengthening the voice of the Arctic in broader international processes (e.g., controlling climate change, phasing out the use of POPs) aimed at dealing with threats to sustainable development that originate elsewhere but pose real dangers in the Arctic. It would be foolish to expect too much from the Arctic Council or to limit efforts to cope with exogenous threats to initiatives pursued through the council. Nonetheless, it seems important to recognize that the council has both an internal role and an external role to play in coming to terms with threats to sustainable development in the Circumpolar North.

Elements of an ASDS

How can we translate the perspective outlined in the preceding sections into an effective "sustainable development program" for the Arctic Council? No doubt, there is room in the formulation of such a program for an array of initiatives proposed by individual council members and other interested parties. This is the bottom-up approach to sustainable development that representatives of the United States have championed in Arctic Council deliberations. In the absence of an effort to devise an overarching strategy for such a program, however, the activities of the council in this realm will lack both programmatic coherence and a set of well-defined priorities that can be used as a basis for allocating resources. In effect, we need to create an ASDS that can lend structure to a "sustainable development program" in much the same way that the AEPS has provided structure for the environmental protection program. The ASDS can and should evolve over time as we gain new insights into the achievement of sustainable development under the conditions prevailing in the Arctic. At the outset, it is possible to identify at least four major themes or clusters of issues that should figure prominently as distinct components of the ASDS: (1) managing human uses of the Arctic's living resources, (2) controlling the impacts of industrial activities in the Arctic, (3) enhancing community viability in the Arctic, and (4) protecting the Arctic from exogenous pressures.

Managing Human Uses of the Arctic's Living Resources. A striking feature of the Arctic is the existence of a close relationship between human welfare and consumptive uses of these resources throughout the region. Whereas the lives of urban dwellers around the world are now largely insulated or even divorced from the harvesting of living resources, activities involving consumptive uses of renewable resources are a part of the daily lives of most Arctic residents. These activities span commercial, subsistence, and recreational uses of living resources. The commercial fisheries of the Bering Sea Region, for example, regularly account for about 5% of the world harvest of living marine resources. Reliance on living resources for subsistence purposes remains a central feature of the mixed economies of small communities scattered throughout both the North American Arctic and the Eurasian Arctic. While few permanent residents of the Arctic are interested in recreational harvesting of living resources as an end in itself, supplying services to recreational hunters and fishers who travel to the region from the South constitutes a substantial source of income for many Arctic communities. The importance of living resources for human welfare in the Circumpolar North encompasses both marine systems and terrestrial systems. In the case of marine systems, interest centers on various species of fish and marine mammals in patterns that exhibit striking variation from one sector of the region to another. With regard to terrestrial systems, by contrast, interest centers on grazing systems in which caribou or reindeer constitute the dominant species.

It follows that sustainable development in the Arctic is, first and foremost, a matter of managing human activities based on consumptive uses of living resources to allow them to endure over the long run. A number of distinct - and often contentious issues - arise in this connection. Who should have the authority to make decisions about allowable harvest levels for various stocks of living resources and what decisionmaking procedures should they employ in arriving at such determinations? A particularly living debate has arisen in this connection regarding the merits of what have become known as co-management regimes in which efforts are made to share decisionmaking responsibilities between individuals representing local users and individuals representing regional or national public authorities. What is the proper allocation of finite stocks of living resources among commercial, subsistence, and recreational users? A question often debated in this connection concerns the justification for granting priority to subsistence users in cases where allowable harvest levels are insufficient to meet the demands of all three user communities. To what extent should harvesting practices in contrast to allowable harvest levels be regulated in the interests of addressing ethical concerns that do not involve the protection of genetic diversity, species, or ecosystems? Debates over the use of leghold traps and other devices used to capture furbearing animals constitute a particularly dramatic example of this cluster of issues. Should individual animals (e.g. bowhead whales) be accorded a right to life that trumps any rights human users may have to harvest them or kill them for consumptive purposes? Issues of this kind underlie many of the contemporary debates about restricting or even prohibiting efforts to market products (e.g. sealskin clothing) derived from Arctic animals. Any successful effort to achieve sustainable development in the Arctic must come to terms with these and a sizable array of similar issues.

Controlling the Impacts of Industrial Activities in the Arctic. During the decades since the close of World War II, industrial activities have become an increasingly prominent feature of the Arctic landscape. For the most part, these activities involve extractive industries seeking to exploit the region's nonrenewable resources together with the infrastructure (e.g., roads. railroads, ports, pipelines) required to support these industries. Given the harsh operating conditions characteristic of high latitudes and the need to move raw materials over long distances to markets in the South, most industrial activities in the Arctic can only achieve commercial viability when carried out on an unusually large scale. Approximately twenty-five percent of the oil produced in the United States comes from the North Slope of Alaska. Most of the natural gas produced in Russia - the world's leading supplier of natural gas - comes from giant fields located in northwestern Siberia. A number of the world's largest mines supplying raw materials such as lead, zinc, copper, and nickel are located in the North American Arctic and in Siberia. The Arctic is a major contributor to the world market in diamonds. Both the Canadian Arctic and the Euro-Arctic have become sites for largescale hydroelectric power production. These developments have led to the construction of major pipelines and ports in Alaska and in the Russian North, along with the haul roads and railroads that typically accompany them and that sometimes give rise to environmental and social impacts greater than those of the pipelines and ports themselves. Even the production of hydroelectricity requires the creation of large reservoirs and the construction of transmission lines capable of moving power from the North to consumers located in urban centers far to the South. Although it would be incorrect to suggest that the Arctic is now saturated with industrial facilities, there is no denying that largescale industrial activities have become a striking reality throughout the Circumpolar North.

In one sense, of course, societies built on extractive industries can never become fully sustainable. Because supplies of nonrenewable resources are finite, there is no escaping the fact that industries dependent on their extraction will have a limited life expectancy. Even the production of hydroelectricity, which need not be concerned about the exhaustion of stream flows, normally involves dams and related structures that can be expected to wear out or require massive rehabilitation within something like fifty years. That said, however, there is a world of difference between largescale industrial activities that are conducted with little or no concern about the environmental and social impacts they cause and those carried out on the understanding that disruptive consequences must be kept to a minimum. There is no reason to tolerate the boom and bust cycles characteristic of nineteenth century mining communities or the social dislocations associated with nineteenth and early twentieth century gold rushes in managing industrial activities in the Arctic today. From the perspective of sustainable development in the Arctic, a number of major issues pertaining to industrialization remain to be resolved. How can industrial activities in northern latitudes be structured to minimize their impact on the region's traditional hunting and gathering and herding systems? Who should benefit from the economic rents derived from the exploitation of raw materials in the Arctic? Are there ways to ensure that local people benefit from employment opportunities and that local businesses are able to compete for service contracts associated with extractive industries, without introducing or exacerbating social pathologies in the small communities located throughout the Arctic? What risks to the health of people living in the Arctic arise from the production of raw materials (e.g., mercury poisoning from the impoundment of water, air pollution from the smelting of ore)? How can these risks be eliminated or controlled in a manner that is compatible with public health standards in advanced industrial societies?

Enhancing Community Viability in the Arctic. The human population of the Arctic includes some ten million people about three-fourths of whom reside in the Russian North. Although many distinctions are possible, it is helpful to divide the human communities of the region in a rough-and-ready fashion into three distinct groups. There are a few small cities - notably Archangel, Magadan, Murmansk, and Norilsk in Russia and Anchorage in Alaska. With populations in the 200-500,000 range, these urban settlements are largely outgrowths of southern efforts to extract raw materials or build up northern defenses rather than products of activities indigenous to the Arctic. A second group encompasses regional centers ranging in size from 5-10,000 (e.g., Barrow, Iqaluit, Nuuk) to 50-70,000 (e.g. Fairbanks, Rovaniemi, and Tromsø). Most of these communities are administrative hubs. The third group includes a wide range of Arctic villages whose populations number less than 5,000 and in a great many cases no more than a few hundred. By contrast with the conditions prevailing in earlier times, even the smaller villages of the Arctic now take the form of permanent or year-around settlements. Indigenous peoples reside in all three groups of communities. In all the small cities and in many of the regional centers, they constitute (often small) minorities. Only in the villages of the Arctic do indigenous peoples constitute a majority population in the Arctic today. Only in Greenland, in the territory of Nunavut in Canada, and in the boroughs of northern Alaska do they form a majority population in major administrative units of the Arctic. Treated as a whole, the human population of the Arctic is not growing. In some ways, this general observation is misleading. Many indigenous populations, especially in the North American Arctic, exhibit relatively high rates of population growth. But the impact of this phenomenon on the overall human population of the Arctic is outweighed by the exodus of non-indigenous persons from the larger communities of the Russian North.

From the perspective of sustainable development, a number of problems relating to community viability in the Arctic stand out. Almost all Arctic communities are heavily dependent on transfer payments from the South. Many suffer from an absence of economic diversification or from extreme dependence either on living resources (e.g., fish stocks) subject to large but often unpredictable natural fluctuations or on nonrenewable resources subject to exhaustion over relatively short periods of time. The larger communities of the Arctic are unusually expensive to maintain both because they are not large enough to benefit from economies of scale in the provision of educational, health, and social services and because some key services (e.g., waste disposal) are particularly costly to supply under Arctic conditions. Although it is important to exercise care in framing generalizations, rapid social change and the social problems that go with it (e.g., alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence) are facts of life throughout much of the Circumpolar North. The situation in many parts of the Russian North has reached crisis proportions. Not only has emigration stripped many communities of human resources needed to provide essential services, but the fact that these communities are located on the fringes of a much larger society undergoing convulsive changes also means that they suffer from acute forms of neglect. Food scarcity during the long months of winter constitutes a very real danger in some parts of the Russian North today. Arctic communities-especially those whose populations are largely indigenous-have long been known for their resourcefulness and their capacity to survive adverse circumstances. Some of this resilience will undoubtedly help individual communities to survive and even to thrive during the foreseeable future. Yet any serious sustainable development program for the Arctic must address as a matter of priority an array of profound threats to the viability of the region's communities that are destined to loom large on the Arctic agenda for some time to come.

Protecting the Arctic from Exogenous Pressures. We have known for some time that the Arctic is sensitive in environmental terms to the consequences of human activities centered in the mid-latitudes. The seasonal air pollution problem known as Arctic haze was first detected as early as the 1950s. Since then, a raft of new environmental impacts have become apparent. Although less dramatic than its Antarctic counterpart, a seasonal thinning of the stratospheric ozone layer is now a regular feature of the Arctic year. Radioactive contaminants travel to the high latitudes along atmospheric, marine, and riverine pathways. The Arctic Basin has become a sink for persistent organic pollutants (POPs). Most scientific observers anticipate that the biogeophysical effects of climate change will manifest themselves early and with particular force in the high latitudes. Effects that are probably linked to climate change, such as increases in the depth of the permafrost's active layer and decreases in the thickness of sea ice, are already well-documented. Although the facts are less well-known, the Arctic also is highly sensitive to a range of socioeconomic and political developments that are often lumped together under the heading of globalization. The attractiveness of the region's oil and gas reserves-which are abundant but expensive to produce-to multinational corporations is closely tied to fluctuations in world market prices. Public policies dealing with matters such as bans on the harvest of marine mammals, seasonal restrictions on the killing of birds, and limitations on the use of leghold traps to capture land animals are formulated in distant capitals by people who have little or no appreciation for their impact on the economies of small Arctic communities. The premium placed on personal mobility in pursuit of employment opportunities in a world shaped by regional and even global trade and financial regimes makes it increasingly difficult for individuals motivated by a sense of place to maintain stable, multi-generational communities in the Arctic.

What this means is that no strategy designed to achieve sustainable development in the Arctic can succeed without finding ways to address these exogenous forces and, in the process, to make the voice of the Arctic heard in a variety of forums around the world. How can this be done? The communities of the Arctic are poorly endowed with the economic and political currencies commonly required to exercise influence over the course of public affairs in today's world. Accordingly, there is little reason for optimism so long as we approach this matter in conventional terms. Yet northern, especially indigenous, peoples have succeeded in getting their concerns heard by the outside world to a degree that is in many ways remarkable. Conservation groups, such as the World Conservation Union (IUCN), have taken note of the critical role that sustainable harvesting of living resources plays in the remote communities of the North. Arctic concerns are being expressed in a forceful manner in the discussions now underway regarding the terms of a global agreement to control the spread of persistent organic pollutants (POPs). Agenda 21, the programmatic document adopted at the close of the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, contains an entire chapter on the concerns of the world's indigenous peoples. In all of these cases, it seems clear that northern residents and indigenous peoples more specifically have found ways to express their concerns in terms of ethical or moral principles that are understandable even in settings in which the dominant, western culture holds sway. Arguments concerning the value of cultural diversity and the rights of distinct cultures to exercise effective control over their own destinies, for instance, have proven particularly effective in these terms. None of this offers grounds for unreflective optimism - much less complacency - about the success of such efforts in the future. But recent experience not only indicates that it is possible to make the voice of the Arctic heard in the outside world but also suggests strategies most likely to prove successful in pursuing this objective.

How should we proceed in the effort to devise an Arctic Sustainable Development Strategy capable of lending coherence to and setting priorities for a sustainable development program capable of operating effectively under the auspices of the Arctic Council? It is too late to adopt the procedure that proved effective in framing the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, a document crafted during the course of the negotiations that eventuated in the 1991 Rovaniemi Declaration. Moreover, the prospects for fleshing out the content of an ASDS through the formal procedures of the Arctic Council are not bright. The September 1998 Iqaluit Declaration does provide for the establishment of a Sustainable Development Working Group which is expected to "... meet prior to the SAO's regular meetings [in order to] facilitate completion of work on sustainable development proposals ..., propose possible priority areas in the further development of the sustainable development program, and review specific proposals and prepare them for approval by the Ministers." At the insistence of the United States, however, this mechanism is tied closely to a conception of the sustainable development program that features a bottom-up strategy in which the Arctic Council is regarded as a mechanism for reviewing and approving specific projects proposed by member countries and Permanent Participants rather than as a more active device for working out the shape and content of a sustainable development program that is circumpolar in nature,

In some ways, this situation is unfortunate; it is likely to lead to the evolution of a sustainable development strategy that lacks coherence and that is composed of a collection of projects of interest to individual sponsors but not accepted as priorities for the Arctic as a whole. Yet there is no reason to give up on the effort to develop an ASDS in the face of these circumstances. One promising option is to create an informal Working Group on Sustainable Development in the Arctic, which would allow a selection of well-informed individuals drawn from both the policymaking community and the scientific community to engage in an off-the-record dialogue about problems of sustainable development arising in the Arctic and ways to address these problems in a manner appropriate to conditions prevailing in this region. There is precedent for adopting such an approach. Starting in 1988, a Working Group on Arctic International Relations held a series of meetings on issues relating to prospects for international cooperation in the Arctic under the conditions arising in the aftermath of the Cold War. It is generally acknowledged that this working group played a constructive role in providing an off-the-record forum in which to explore options regarding issues like the creation of the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) and the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS). Naturally, it would be inappropriate to expect too much from the efforts of specific mechanism of this sort. But the time is ripe to take advantage of the services of an informal working group as a mechanism to encourage imaginative thinking about the shape and content of an Arctic Sustainable Development Strategy.