Legitimating the Antarctic Treaty System: from rich nations club to planetary ecological democracy?

ABSTRACT

Like other international institutions, the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) relies on the goodwill and self-binding commitment of its members. Legitimacy, understood as the belief in the ‘rightfulness’ of a governing arrangement by its stakeholders, lies at the heart of the ATS’ success as a multilateral institution. Global warming and geopolitical power shifts are poised to challenge established forms of Antarctic legitimacy and effectiveness, with external calls for Antarctic democratisation and reform increasing. Using the concepts of input, output, and throughput legitimacy, this paper explores how the ATS has been legitimated as the only authoritative decision-making context for Antarctic matters, internally amongst Treaty Partners as well as externally towards the rest of the international community. It argues that the increase of input legitimacy through the inclusion of more consultative parties led to a perceived lack of output legitimacy for some especially environmental critics which illustrates the importance but also the limits of maintaining consensus about throughput legitimacy: the agreed upon processes and rules of decision-making. Finally, the analysis problematises the inhibiting centrality of nation states and the logic of sovereignty during times of global ecological and geopolitical change and asks how an ambitiously democratic future of Antarctic governance in the Anthropocene might look like.

KEYWORDS:

• Antarctica
• legitimacy
• geopolitics
• environmental governance
• nationalism
• postcolonialism
• posthumanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I would like to thank Matt Castle, Bob Frame, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their generous and very helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.

2 I owe this example of a previous runway episode and more than human agency to Klaus Dodds.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patrick Flamm

Patrick Flamm is Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the Political Science and International Relations programme at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He holds a PhD degree in Asian Studies from the University of Auckland and has studied International Relations at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany and Korea University in Seoul, South Korea. His research focuses on global geopolitical and ecological change, especially in terms of identity, security, and cooperation in the Antarctic, the Asia-Pacific, and the Anthropocene.