Regional Applications |
this century, the region has been divided roughly in half between Russia on one side and the western Arctic countries on the other. For the most part, the policies followed and the institutions created in the two halves of the region during the twentieth century have been strikingly different. This affords interesting opportunities to engage in systematic comparisons of the effects of different institutions operating in a relatively uniform biophysical setting. Recently, the region has experienced a burst of institutional and organizational innovations that are distinctly relevant to environmental protection and sustainable development. These include: 1. experiments with new systems of land tenure and resource management (e.g., co-management arrangements associated with the settlement of aboriginal land claims); 2. the devolution of authority from the center to the periphery as in the creation of the North Slope Borough in Alaska (1972), the Greenland Home Rule (1979), and the Nunavut Territory in Canada (scheduled to become official in 1999); 3. the restructuring of domestic political arrangements in societies undergoing transition, as reflected in the current constitutional debates within the Russian Federation; and 4. a raft of new regionwide arrangements, including intergovernmental ones (e.g., the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, the Arctic Council) and nongovernmental ones (e.g., the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, the International Arctic Science Committee). Students of the institutional dimensions of global environmental change are drawn to study the Far North by the expectation that global changes will be felt “first and worst� in this region and by the exceptional opportunities the region affords to examine the problems of fit and interplay. Because the region’s biogeophysical systems are relatively extreme or, in any case, markedly different from their counterparts in the mid-latitudes, it is possible to investigate both the dynamics of distinctive institutional arrangements that indigenous peoples have devised to regulate human inter-actions with northern ecosystems and the problems arising from efforts on the part of outsiders to impose institutions developed in the mid-la- Small-scale rice cultivation, Bangladesh. titudes on conditions prevai- Photo placed at disposal by the Geographical Institute, ling in the Circumpolar North. University of Bonn, Germany. The North has emerged in recent years as a particularly fertile ground for experiments with institutional ar-rangements designed to augment the voice of local resource users (e.g., co-management regimes), to protect the interests of remote areas with sparse human populations (e.g., the Home Rule arrangements in GreenScience Plan - Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change | 77