Commentary
The Arctic Council Permanent Participants:
Capacity & Support – Past, Present & Future
Jim Gamble
The six Indigenous organizations which are the Permanent Participants (PPs) of the Arctic Council
(AC) are as varied as the people, geographic regions, and cultures they represent. What they do have
in common however is the challenge of representing their constituencies and contributing to the work
of an ever expanding AC which in many cases has grown faster than the PPs have been able to adapt.
Indigenous organizations have been involved in international work through entities like the United
Nations since long before the AC existed, so given that this voice was present and the growing
realization among industry, policy makers, and scientists that Indigenous knowledge could not only
be useful, but in many cases was essential to understanding the Arctic. Not only this, but in many
cases Indigenous peoples were actually land owners and rights holders in the Arctic, and so
consultation, negotiation, and agreement with the people who lived on the land was often a matter of
law.
So, in the earliest seed of the AC, the Rovaniemi Process, the notion that the Indigenous peoples of
the Arctic should have a seat at the table was present. When the Rovaniemi Process was formalized
into an agreement among the eight Arctic states to form the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy
(AEPS) three organizations were established as observers when the following was stated:
Jim Gamble is the Executive Director of the Aleut International Association.