Arctic Yearbook 2015 -- Arctic Governance and Governing

Preface - Arctic Governance Fran Ulmer “The most important thing for people to know about the governance of the Arctic is that we have a chance now to act to maintain the integrity of the system or to lose it. To lose it means that we will dismember the vital systems that make the Arctic work. It's not just a cost to the people who live there. It's a cost to all people everywhere.” -Sylvia Earle Governance is “the processes of interaction and decision-making among the actors involved in a collective problem that lead to the creation, reinforcement, or reproduction of social norms and institutions.”2 In short, it’s the effort to make good decisions for society

U.S. foreign policy in the Arctic : identity and national interests in the Post-Cold war era **(Thèse différée jusqu'en mars 2025)**

The Obama administration’s foreign policy approach to the Arctic region was significantly different than anything other U.S. presidency. The 2013 National Strategy for the Arctic Region was established to provide the U.S. with a roadmap and toolkit based on ‘soft power’ projection aimed at enhancing American influence in a region facing significant climatic and geopolitical changes. Prior to the Obama administration, the U.S. had a tendency to approach the Arctic with great reluctance, resulting in what many observers have described as an American foreign policy gap with respect to the Arctic region. With heightened American attention to Arctic issues and focus on selected priorities in the region, a distinctive geopolitical environment began to form in which multilateral cooperation could expand beyond the traditional institutional and normative setting of the Arctic Council – the region’s preeminent institution in terms of governance. This thesis seeks to explain continuity and change in U.S. foreign policy toward the Arctic region by looking specifically at the role of national interests and identity: their evolving definitions and meanings in different presidential cycles. It compares President Obama’s foreign policy with that of previous administrations since the end of the cold war to see how the material and ideational representations of identity, discourse and norms can shape how a foreign policy is designed and implemented, and how it evolves or remains unchanged. Based on theoretical assumptions from constructivism in the field of International Relations, the study seeks to deepen the inquiry of policy actions from each administration by borrowing conceptual tools from the Multiple Streams Analysis of policy-making in the field of public policy analysis, and the literature of agenda-setting. Through that process, the thesis argues that presidential beliefs about the Arctic have played a central role on how the U.S. approached the region since the end of the cold war

The Arctic Yearbook

The arctic Yearbook 2012 is the outcome of the work conducted by the Northern Research Forum and the University of the Arctic Thematic Network (TN) on Geopolitics and Security. The Arctic Yearbook is intended to be the preeminent repository of critical analysis on the Arctic region, with a mandate to inform observers about the state of the Arctic geopolitics and security. The Arctic Yearbook 2012 is accessible on line under limited copyright protection