Stringent Policy Responses to New Risks? Arctic International Environmental Regulation of Maritime Industries in Comparative Perspective

The paper studies the stringency of international regulatory responses to new environmental risks using the example of maritime industries in the Arctic. The growth of maritime industries in the Arctic poses additional environmental risks to this ecologically vulnerable region. To what extent have these risks been responded to in a regulatory stringent or lax way? While some observers are comfortable with recent regulatory advances such as the IMO Polar Code for shipping, others point to persisting gaps. The paper assesses the stringency of public international regulations in the Arctic that address environmental impacts occurring from maritime shipping and offshore oil and gas production operations, and compares it globally.

The assessment builds on a new concept of regulatory stringency that amends typologies of regulatory design from International Relations, International Law, and Economics. Stringency is defined here as the product of the formal tightness and substantive ambition of regulations. Tightness refers to the legality, precision, and monitoring and enforcement system of a regulation. Ambition covers changes in substantive scope, as well as in the level of requirements compared to prior regulation and to regulation elsewhere on the globe. The concept is operationalized through a two-tiered, multi-dimensional, ordinal-scale index.

The paper presents a new database that describes empirical variance in the stringency of international environmental regulations of maritime shipping and offshore oil and gas production from 1950 to 2015. For the Arctic, it covers regulations drafted by international regulatory bodies such as the IMO, Arctic Council, and OSPAR Commission. Regulations that wholly or partly cover the Arctic are compared to regulations in other vulnerable sea regions, such as Antarctica, the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. Within the Arctic, regulatory stringency is compared across regulators, industries, and time.

The paper summarizes emerging patterns in the stringency of international regulatory responses to new environmental risks. The findings are relevant for scientists and policy-makers alike. Scientists can use them to inquire into the causes of lax or stringent regulation, and into its political, economic and ecological effects. Arctic policy-makers can use them to identify potentials and blueprints for the development of more stringent regulations in the future.