Organizational learning in regional governance: A study of the Arctic Council

Rapid change and uncertainty create new demands on governance structures, especially to accommodate new knowledge and take action to respond to new priority issues.

While the Arctic Council has been able to accommodate some issues that were not prominent when its structure was first created, the current set-up has not facilitated the inclusion of new issues and perspectives. There is thus a need for the Arctic Council to think about ways in which learning can be facilitated, especially for issues requiring a broad range of expertise or which may be politically contentious.

As challenges extend across spatial scales, the notion of governance fit is better applied to the organizational capacity for learning than to identifying the best scale and scope of governance arrangements.

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