The coordination of policy priorities among regional institutions from the Baltic Sea to the Arctic: the institutions – coordination dilemma

ABSTRACT

We examine the coordination of policy priorities among the Arctic Council, the Barents Euro-Arctic Council, the Council of Baltic Sea States, and the Nordic Council of Ministers. The member states of these groups established these institutions to coordinate their regional cooperation. However, the member states ended up having to coordinate the parallel work of these institutions. This coordination effort influenced their cooperation, creating an institutional coordination dilemma. We analyze how interests, leadership, and identity politics influence this dilemma and how negative, problem-solving, and positive forms of coordination can amend its effects regarding the temporal consistency of policy priorities and their sectoral overlap.

KEYWORDS:

• Arctic Council
• Barents Euro-Arctic Council
• Council of Baltic Sea States
• Nordic Council of Ministers
• northern Europe
• institutions
• coordination
• policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Commission’s legal mandate to represent the EU was initially problematic.

2. HELCOM is also an intergovernmental institution with a narrow mandate focusing solely on the environmental governance of the Baltic Sea.

3. A budget reform during Sweden’s chairmanship in 2013 combined the globalization and presidency budgets to form a shared priority budget. Further reforms were considered during the 2014 Icelandic chairmanship; see Swedish Presidency (2012) Icelandic Presidency (2013). In 2014, the General Secretary of the NCM proposed 39 measures to improve Nordic cooperation which the Finnish presidency of 2016 committed to work on (Finnish Presidency 2016).

4. We refer only to three options in the four-dimensional model of Scharpf and Mor (1994), who include bargaining over distributive issues as the option between problem solving and positive coordination. However, bargaining is not directly applicable to our case of the regional intergovernmental coordination of northern Europe, where distribution issues are relatively few. In our applied model, we recognize the ambiguity of the term “problem solving.” It is reminiscent of e.g. “pragmatic coordination,” which furthermore could apply to all three of our forms of coordination. We prefer to keep “problem solving” to maintain sufficient connection to Scharpf and Mor. However, we define positive coordination more loosely than they do, as the hypothetical extreme end-result of highly integrated regional coordination.

5. Related cooperation existed with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

6. In Summer 2015 the NCM closed its Russian offices after being classified as a “foreign agent.”

7. While the UN bodies now process the delimitation of the Arctic waters, for the Barents Sea, however, uncertainty dramatically diminished when Russia and Norway finally agreed on a delimitation line, which they ratified on 7 June 2011. This will facilitate the geo-economic management of the seas stretching from the waters off Kirkenes to 85° north.

8. Here the findings of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) report on climate change were to be followed. The Norwegian chairmanship emphatically stressed climate change. Its chairmanship yielded a research program on black carbon under the AC’s Task Force on Short-Lived Climate Forces, the result of which has now been marked as “a major deliverable” as the Danish chairmanship of the AC ends.

9. The largest environmental project in the north has been the construction of the St. Petersburg South-Western Wastewater Treatment Plant. The Northern Dimension Environmental Partnership (NDEP) part-funded it although it was completed before the ND’s reform in 2006. Overall, the NDEP has invested 76.28 million euros in environmental projects in Russia and 6 million in Belarus; and 162 million euros in nuclear safety (NDEP 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Norway; Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Finland; and Suomen Akatemia [139686,CoE Russia(Kivinen 2012–2017)];

Notes on contributors

Pami Aalto

Pami Aalto is a professor of international relations at the School of Management, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland. His research interests include northern Europe, the Arctic, the European Union, Russia, East Asia, energy policy, geopolitics, international society, and other interdisciplinary topics. He is the editor of Russia’s Energy Policies: National, Interregional and Global Levels (Edward Elgar, 2012).

Aileen A. Espíritu

Aileen A. Espíritu is a researcher and associate professor at The Barents Institute, UiT the Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway. Her current research foci are the urban Arctic, regional development, gender, extractive industries, border delimitations in the Arctic and Asia, and governance. She is the editor-in-chief of the refereed journal Barents Studies.

Sarah Kilpeläinen

Sarah Kilpeläinen is a doctoral student of international relations at the School of Management, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland. Her research interests include energy policy, border studies, regionalism, northern Europe, the Mediterranean, and North Africa. Her forthcoming dissertation focuses on perceptions of EU external energy policy in North Africa.

Dmitry A. Lanko

Dmitry A. Lanko is an associate professor in the Department of European Studies, School of International Relations, St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia. Besides St. Petersburg, he has also taught Russian foreign policy as a visiting lecturer at George Mason University; the Universities of Tampere and Turku, both in Finland; Tartu University in Estonia; and Korea University in South Korea.