At the Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Tromsø in April 2009, the chairmanship of the council was passed on from Norway to Denmark. Denmark, at the end of its term in 2011, will in its turn pass the chairmanship on to Sweden that will thus take the suite of Scandinavian Arctic Council Chairs to its completion in 2013. In their common programme, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden in 2007 stressed the need for applying an integrated, sustainable, and ecosystem-based approach to the use of Arctic resources, all of which concerns, according to the programme, might be comprised within a holistic perspective. And the needs of Arctic communities and indigenous peoples is clearly seen as falling within a such perspective. The Danish chairmanship, in its own program, likewise evokes a holistic perspective to comprise a complex of concerns about environmental protection, conservation of Arctic flora and fauna, and the preservation of the livelihoods of indigenous peoples and Arctic communities that, the programme states, remains at the core of the work of the Arctic Council. Thus, on the one hand, the Chair recognises the centrality of indigenous peoples' needs and rights, via the category of Permanents Participants, to the idea of the Arctic Council; yet, on the other hand, like in the Danish programme, the council is cautious to speak not only of indigenous peoples, but also of local people, and to speak not only of people(s), but also of communities and residents. Conversely, the indigenous peoples' organisations that are permanents participant in the Arctic Council also cautiously stress that they - as is the case with the Arctic States - are much more than that and that they partake actively in international processes and initiatives in their own right and outside of the auspices of the Arctic Council.
  
Climate change A clear-cut example of this could be seen in connection with COP15 in Copenhagen in December last year. The Arctic Council Chair announced that no consensus could be reached with respect to having the Arctic Council itself apply for accreditation as an observer to the COP15 and, consequently, the Arctic Council would not formally take part in it. At the same time, most of the Arctic indigenous peoples' organisations were already accredited as observers to the UN climate negotiations system. In 2008, the Arctic Council Indigenous Peoples Secretariat (IPS) and the six Permanent Participants organised and took part in a climate change adaptation workshop financed by the Nordic Council of Ministers. The proceedings from this workshop formed part of the input to the Indigenous Peoples Global Summit on Climate Change that was held in Anchorage in April, 2009. And, notwithstanding its not especially unified character, the declaration resulting from the Summit formed part of the indigenous peoples' input to the climate negotiations meeting leading up to and to the COP15 itself. Although not being formally a participant, the Arctic Council contributed indirectly to the Copenhagen conference as reports on and films about one of its projects, the "Arctic Cryosphere project - Snow, Water, Ice, and Permafrost in the Arctic" was featured in a COP15 side event, viz., the "Melting Ice" event organised by Norway, Denmark, and former vice-President of the United States of America, Al Gore. Two permanent participants, the Inuit Circumpolar Council and the Arctic Athabaskan Council, were each granted a side event slot at the COP15 venue, and each of these events was eventually affected by the logistical problems that in different ways marked the course of events in December 2009. Some 40,000 participants and accredited observers had come to Copenhagen for the conference, and as the official venue, the Bella Centre, had a maximum capacity of around 15,000, and with no clear and transparent access regulations in place, with people standing in endless lines outside the venue, waiting in vain to be let in, the often chaotic outcome was in reality predictable. The mood of growing discontent and despair among observers left outside in the cold no doubt mirrored that of most negotiators inside the venue at the official plenary meetings as the conference drew towards its close with only a disappointing and inconclusive Copenhagen Accord to show for itself and the world.

The Arctic and the Globe Just as the stakeholders of the Arctic Council have eagerly sought to bring their concerns to and imprint the global climate negotiations, so an increasing international focus on Arctic issues - spurred by the facts, the threats and new opportunities of climate change - is making itself felt, and applications from non-Arctic states and organisations for observer status at the Arctic Council keep ticking in. The official consensus reached by the Arctic Council is to consider Observers and Observer applicants assets to the work of the council, and that ways should be found to further the Observers' involvement in and contributions to the strivings of the council to promote sustainable development for its member states and for peoples of the Arctic. The Danish chairmanship has stated that, in this process of increasing international interest, increasing importance, and increasing work load of the council, the Permanent Participants category's unique contribution must be safeguarded and strengthened, thereby implying that the growing number and influence of Observers might potentially shift the established and prescribed role of the Permanent Participants within the council. The Permanent Participants, along with the Arctic Council state members, have engaged themselves deeply in the work with assessing applicants as well as in the work with revising criteria for granting Observer status. Thus, the Permanent Participants have objected to applicants that have not adequately stated and described their intentions to work with the Permanents Participants. To sum up, the Permanent Participants seem to be up against challenges related to the globalisation, to the demands for an ever increasing awareness of the interrelatedness of Arctic and global environmental processes, and to the ever increasing need for transcending the Arctic scene and attend various Conferences of Parties, the next of which will be the that of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Japan, October 2010. The challenge, not least and as seen from an observational, yet deeply engaged stance consists in finding ways to redefine the being and processes of indigenous living in relation to other processes of linking regional, Arctic issues and concerns to the corresponding global ones, in such a way as to avoid the predicament of being exclusively linked to concerns of conservation and preservation of natural diversity, and so as to allow space for operating in terms of cultural, ethnical, and socio-economic developments and concerns and to not have these confused with those of natural science.

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This article will appear as a chapter on the Arctic Council in IWGIA's "The Indigenous World 2010" yearbook