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exclusion (active barring of issues from the policy agenda).2 Moreover, as leaders of individual sessions,
chairs open and close meetings, structure their agenda, allot the right to speak to participants and
summarize the results of sessions (Tallberg 2010: 246). Brokerage, rather than involving a formal
concession of powers to the chair by the other parties, refers to the situation where a chair serves as
a channel of information among states who, for tactical reasons, conceal their true preferences but
share information about them with the chair who thus gets privileged access to information that may
then be used to construct compromise. In addition, oftentimes the chair’s mandate gives it a right to
produce a single negotiating text as a basis for consensus. Finally, representation involves the chair
being empowered by the other parties to speak on their behalf, since institutions typically cannot be
represented by all their constituent members in relations with the outside world (Tallberg 2010: 245).
According to Tallberg, “the office of the chair, once vested with power of process control, offers a
political platform for influencing outcomes of the process” (Tallberg 2010: 245). Even though the
chair is usually expected to conduct assigned functions with a view to promoting collective gains,
holding a chairmanship may be seen by certain actors as a ‘window of opportunity’ to shift the agenda
and distribution of gains in pursuit of their national interests. Additionally, a comparison study carried
out by Tallberg on three alternative ways of organizing the office of the chair - rotation between states
(like the Presidency of the European Union), appointment of a supranational official (as in the case
of the WTO Trade Negotiations Committee) and election of one state’s representative (UN
environmental conferences) - points to the rotating chairmanship (like the Arctic Council one) as a
model particularly open to distributional influence and generating a process of logrolling, strengthened
furthered in situations where the state in office controls multiple chairs of sub-groups within the
organization and where the chairmanship of all or most of those sub-groups shift from one state to
the other at the same time (Tallberg 2010).
Yet chairs do not operate in a world without constraints and the mere fact that a chairmanship rotates
between state representatives is not a guarantee for patterns of distributional impact. Blavoukos,
Bourantonis and Tsakonas differentiate between three groups of parameters that affect the chair’s
ability to perform the assigned roles and tasks.3 First, they point to the international environment and
the nature of the issue under consideration. Since international institutions do not operate in a vacuum,
“the systemic power configuration creates an international climate within which the chair operates”
(Blavoukos et al. 2006: 150). A polarized, conflictive climate constraints not only the chair’s resources
(e.g. privileged access to information) but also limits its assigned roles to merely procedural tasks and
formalities. As for the nature of issue under consideration, its salience and the degree of controversy
associated with it both affect the chair’s ability to perform its functions. In general, the more salient
the issue is for the parties, the more difficult it is for the chair to succeed. The same is true with the
degree of controversy. For example, matters of ‘hard’ military security and sovereignty are usually
more sensitive and therefore more difficult to handle than ‘soft’ matters such as economic cooperation
or environmental protection, with the Arctic Council being an excellent example of this.
The second group of parameters affecting the chair is institution-specific and involves the institutional
design of the chairmanship, the resources available to a chair, and the formal and informal constraints
put upon it. The institutional design of the chairmanship – the three alternative ways of organizing
Smieszek & Kankaanpää