Climate change has direct and indirect consequences for individuals and their human rights (McInerney-Lankford et al. 2011). With the Arctic warming at twice the global rate, its inhabitants already experience many of these challenges. Marginalized groups, like women and indigenous peoples, are particularly vulnerable, with existing research providing evidence of ongoing and potential threats to their roles in community adaptation and in shaping change (Cameron 2011, Arctic Resilience Report 2016. While women's rights are formally codified as human rights under the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and indigenous peoples' human rights are codified and recognized in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), indigenous women's rights are often neglected at both the international and local level. In this article, we apply an intersectional lens to demonstrate that indigenous and non-indigenous women are agents of change. In doing so, we examine how a human rights based approach might ensure indigenous women's participatory role and legal status in the international climate change regime, as well as its related programs.
On 21 May 2021, a milestone Pan-Arctic Report: Gender Equality in the Arctic was published in tandem with the Arctic Council’s Ministerial Meeting held in Reykjavík, 19–20 May 2021. This article provides a brief review of the report and its major findings across six chapters that address key themes concerning gender equality in the Arctic: Law and Governance, Security, Gender and Environment, Migration and Mobility, Indigeneity, Gender, Violence, Reconciliation and Empowerment and Fate Control. A major conclusion of the report is that accessible, comparable, gender-disaggregated, and Arctic -specific data is severely lacking. Further, all chapters highlight the importance of gender-based analysis and gender mainstreaming in all decision-making processes at national and regional levels. The varying roles that gender—and its intersections with existing inequalities—plays in mediating the impacts of climate change and other socioeconomic transformations are also discussed throughout the report. The Arctic Council is identified as the main driver for implementing recommendations that were provided and discussed at the Council’s Ministerial Meeting and in the Reykjavík Declaration 2021, where the eight ministers of Arctic states “Emphasize[s] the importance of gender equality and respect for diversity for sustainable development in the Arctic… encourage[s] the mainstreaming of gender-based analysis in the work of the Arctic Council and call[s] for further action to advance gender equality in the Arctic”. This report and its policy relevant highlights, address these priorities and serve as a knowledge base for promoting gender equality and non-discrimination in the Arctic.
We often mistakenly assume that institutional design will remain effective indefinitely. Complex long-term environmental challenges illuminate the disparity between institutions and state boundaries. While globalization has challenged monocentrism, we must look beyond traditional measures and design resilient governance systems, such as polycentric governance, that combine trust and local expertise in small-scale governance with the governance capacity of large-scale systems. These harness globalization’s benefits and provide solutions for the effects of ecosystem changes. This work examines the lessons – benefits, challenges, limitations, and unanswered questions – that may be learned from polycentric governance in the case of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) in the Arctic, where a polycentric political system has developed as a result of a mismatch in environmental, jurisdictional, and temporal scales. Section One examines characteristics of polycentricity, focusing on actors, multilevel governance, degree of formality, and the nature of interactions. Section Two concentrates on the tools utilized. Section Three applies the outlined framework. Finally, Section Four examines three lessons that global environmental governance may learn from the case study: (1) Peak organizations are effective tools for managing polycentricity, allowing for the inclusion of non-state actors, such as indigenous peoples organizations (2) and epistemic communities (3), in bridging the human-environment nexus.
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