Subjective Environmentalism: The Barents Euro-Arctic Council and Its Climate Change Policy

Abstract

Established against the ideological spillovers and conceptual remnants of the Cold War, the Barents Euro-Arctic Council (BEAC) rapidly assumed a utility purpose in the European regionalization process. The dialectics of critical security theories conferred on the BEAC the identity of a regional security organisation, tasked to combat certain threats and thereby maintain the structural stability of the region. Characteristically, climate change became part of the subject-matter of BEAC’s environmental security plan, prompting a totally new approach to global climate change and generating a subtype in climate change discourse called “subjective environmentalism”.