Scale-jumping in the Arctic Council: Indigenous Permanent Participants and Asian observer states

Abstract

In 2013, the Arctic Council admitted the Asian countries of China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and India as observers. Since then, two Asian observers in particular – South Korea and Singapore – have developed partnerships with the Permanent Participants (PPs), which each represent an Arctic Indigenous Peoples’ organization. PPs like the Aleut International Association have cooperated in projects such as examining the possible construction of an Arctic port and mapping Indigenous marine usage. This ‘scale-jumping’ in Arctic governance demonstrates how emerging relationships between the observers and PPs are rescaling Arctic geopolitics towards post-sovereign governance. This phenomenon does not replace the body’s primary mode of cooperation, which still occurs between the eight member states possessing Arctic territory. Yet it demonstrates how the Arctic Council’s structural organization, in which Permanent Participants are arguably secondary to the member states and observers even more so, is inadvertently fostering alliances between stakeholders lacking territorial sovereignty in the region.