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The 20th anniversary of the Arctic Council in 2016 provided an excellent opportunity for evaluating the council's performance over its two decades in operation. Along the AC's appraisals, various commentators -both from within and without the council's circles -put forward proposals to reform the AC in order to, arguably, strengthen it and enhance its effectiveness vis-à-vis new challenges facing the Arctic. Interestingly, most of those accounts have only tenuous, if any, connection with the general literature on international environmental regimes and their effectiveness. As a result, they do not draw from the insights flowing from this literature and, in reverse, they miss an opportunity to contribute to the broader body of knowledge about international environmental institutions. The lack of systematic inquiry also hampers our ability to accumulate knowledge about the performance of the Arctic Council itself. To address that matter, this article draws up a basic framework through which future assessments of the AC's effectiveness could be grounded in the general literature on international regimes. The study treats the AC as an institution or regime as these terms are used in the broader literature on international relations. It adopts the political definition of institutional effectiveness and is based on literature reviews related to international regimes and the Arctic Council as well as, whenever relevant, on the subject of Arctic governance at large.Overall, the article underlines the critical importance of systematic inquiry and transparency in producing insights regarding the AC's effectiveness -as of any other institution -to allow for accumulation of our comprehension of what makes the Arctic Council work.

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Climate change has significant consequences for both the natural environment and the socioeconomics in the Arctic. The complex interplay between the changing atmosphere, cryosphere, and ocean is responsible for a multitude of feedbacks and cascading effects leading to changes in the marine and terrestrial ecosystems, the sea ice cycle, and atmospheric circulation patterns. The warming Arctic has also become a region of economic interest as shipping, natural resource exploitation, and tourism are becoming achievable and lucrative with declining sea ice. Such climatic and anthropogenic developments are leading to profound changes in the Arctic, its people, and their cultural heritage.