Kenneth Høegh’s mission to keep the Arctic talking

The Arctic Council marks 30 years with Russia frozen out and the United States eyeing Greenland. Its Greenlandic chair, Kenneth Høegh, is trying to hold cooperation together. The question underneath is whether that is still possible.

Kenneth Høegh has a modest word for his own job. He is, he says, the “glue”: the figure who travels constantly, meets the Council’s members separately because they can no longer all sit together and keeps a forum talking that can no longer formally meet.

For three decades the Arctic Council was the place where the eight Arctic states and the region’s Indigenous peoples worked at one table. Høegh’s task, in its 30th year, is to make sure that table still means something when some of its members are technically absent from it.

“It’s still, I usually say, alive and kicking,” Høegh said. “We don’t have the political cooperation, we don’t have the fully fledged diplomatic cooperation.” It was a line he returned to more than once during the interview: “It’s not back to what it used to be. But it’s not dead either.”

Høegh is the Kingdom of Denmark’s first Arctic Ambassador and the chair of its Senior Arctic Officials for the 2025 to 2027 chairship. A Greenlander from the south of the island and an agronomist by training, with a past in development work for the Danish foreign ministry, he was selected by the government of Greenland, approved by Denmark and the Faroe Islands and appointed by the Danish foreign minister.

Putting a Greenlander at the head of the Kingdom’s chairship was meant as a signal that the Arctic is Greenland’s region to represent, not Copenhagen’s.

He took over an institution already in suspension. Official meetings have been paused since March 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led the seven Western members to step back from cooperation with Moscow, which then held the chair. The Council’s working groups, its scientific backbone, resumed virtual meetings in 2024 and continue, with all eight states including Russia taking part.

Those working groups are the part of the Council that still functions and Høegh points to them whenever the conversation turns to its troubles. There are six of them and they are where the Council’s actual work happens: standing expert bodies that monitor Arctic conditions and run joint projects on the environment, climate, biodiversity, sustainable development and the marine Arctic.

They produce the assessments that have fed into international agreements on shipping and pollutants and they bring together scientists from all eight member states. New projects are still being defined, Høegh said, though the meetings now happen virtually rather than in person.

His example of choice is wildland fires, a problem that crosses borders and that the Norwegian chairship before him had also taken up. The fires of Canada affect the fires of Alaska, he said, and even Greenland has seen tundra burn after low rainfall and higher temperatures. “There isn’t any border for fire,” he said. It is the kind of problem the Council was built for, common to the whole region and beyond any single nation to solve.

Two pressures

Asked whether these are unprecedented times for the Council, Høegh reached for continuity rather than crisis. There have always been disagreements, he said, and the Council runs on consensus, which has never been easy. “The last years have been a struggle, but everybody is interested in continuing this cooperation, because it’s so important.”

The struggle has two sources, and Høegh handles them very differently.

The first is Russia. Several Arctic scientists have argued in recent months that it has become imperative to pull Russia back into Western scientific cooperation. Høegh declined to engage with that framing, answering instead with the procedural facts: the working groups resumed in 2024, the cooperation is virtual, it includes all states, and one of the groups is chaired by Russia.

Asked whether Russia, which stopped paying its dues to the Council that same year and which holds the largest share of the Arctic’s land and population, needs to be brought back more formally, he repeated the same point. All Arctic states work on equal levels within the working groups. The rest, he said, is out of his hands.

Torsten Kjølby Nielsen, the Kingdom’s national Senior Arctic Official, who had asked to sit in on the interview, was blunter about where that leaves things.

“I don’t think one can expect a normally functioning Arctic Council without a satisfactory solution to the war in Ukraine,” he said. “We’re sort of managing the problem here, making sure the Council works as well as it can, whilst at the same time not having normal relations between the Arctic states.”

The mechanics of managing it were the subject of an announcement the chairship made the same day as the interview. In a statement, the Kingdom said it had concluded a pilot round of three “strategic planning consultations,” meetings held in smaller groups rather than the full setting the Council can no longer convene.

The novelty, Høegh and Nielsen said, was that this round had brought the working groups and the permanent participants into the discussions alongside the states, rather than the states meeting on their own. It meant more dialogue and more transparency between the different actors, Nielsen said. Høegh framed it as keeping the Council relevant and responsive at a moment when a return to business as usual is not possible, and tied it to the 30th anniversary as a reason to be innovative and use the openings that exist.

The second pressure is the one Høegh would not discuss. The United States, under a president who has been explicit about wanting to acquire Greenland, is the unavoidable presence over any conversation about the Arctic this year, and Høegh is a Greenlander. Asked whether, separate from his diplomatic role, it affected him personally to know that one of the Council’s own member states has designs on his homeland, he did not answer the personal question.

“I deal with the multilateral cooperation among the eight Arctic states,” he said. “I don’t deal with bilateral issues between the Arctic states. That’s simply my answer.”

Pressed on whether it complicated his work to have the Council’s most powerful member coveting a smaller ally, he held the same position.

“We work with all our counterparts among the Arctic states. That’s all I can say. And I think we achieve results with all of them.”

At that point Nielsen stepped in to add that Greenland’s status sits with a separate and deliberately discreet process involving the United States, Denmark and Greenland, one that does not enter their daily work at the Council. The question was not returned to.

The firewall

When the Arctic Council was founded in 1996, its architects kept questions of security and defence off the table and that decision looks, thirty years on, like the source of its longevity. The Council handles the environment, science, search and rescue and the human business of the North. It does not handle sovereignty, borders or war.

Høegh’s refusal to be drawn on Greenland is consistent with that boundary. The moment the Council becomes the place where its members argue about who owns Greenland, it stops being able to do the rest of its work and there is no other forum where all eight states still cooperate.

The same boundary is also the Council’s central limitation and it has rarely been as exposed as it is now. The eight states that cooperate on wildfires and search and rescue within the Council are, outside it, sanctioning one another and, in the case of the United States and Greenland, openly contesting the future of a member’s territory.

The forum survives precisely because it does not discuss any of this. The design that keeps the members at the table is the same design that keeps the most consequential questions facing the Arctic off it. Longevity is bought at the price of relevance to the very pressures now bearing down on the region and the wildfire science continues while the larger questions go to other rooms, if they are discussed at all.

Høegh observes the boundary closely and the same instinct governs who he is willing to speak for. Asked whether the Council has lived up to its promise of seating Indigenous peoples as equals, Høegh declined to answer on their behalf. “That’s a question you should ask the Indigenous Peoples Organizations,” he said. “I won’t talk on their behalf.”

He was warm about their role. The permanent participants, as the six Indigenous organizations are known, stay for decades and accumulate institutional knowledge that diplomats, “seasonal birds” who come and go in three or four years, never match. The Inuit Circumpolar Council, he said, was the Kingdom’s most important partner in designing the chairship program.

Out of his hands

Høegh works within that constraint rather than against it and he insists it leaves room for optimism. He said that he is hopeful about the Council’s future. But much of his account described matters beyond his control. The format he is improvising now, meeting members in smaller groups because they cannot all convene, is, he allowed, probably the best available under the circumstances. Whether it becomes the shape of the Council’s next decade or gives way to a return to normal “all depends on something which is out of our hands.”

The Kingdom hands the chairship to Sweden in 2027, and more than half of its two-year term has already passed. Asked what he would want to leave in better shape than he found it, Høegh named communication: more dialogue across the whole Arctic Council “family” of states, Indigenous peoples, working groups and the observer states and organizations.

The Norwegian chairship before his had restarted the Council’s activities after the freeze, he said, and he believed his own had pushed the level of contact further, the joint consultations included.

He also pointed to the people he most wants the Council’s work to reach. A youth conference is planned for Nuuk, one that he stressed would be prepared by young people and run by them rather than designed for them. The Council, he said, was moving beyond its original role as a monitor of the Arctic environment toward more hands-on human questions, among them mental health among Arctic communities and the young in particular. Keeping the Council relevant to the people who actually live in the North, he argued, is what will keep it alive. Alongside the youth conference he pointed to a November workshop on sustainable economic development as an initiative he hoped would outlast the chairship.

He wants to hand Sweden a Council that is talking more widely than the one he inherited, even if it is still not meeting as it once did.

It is a modest account of a legacy, centred on keeping people in contact rather than on any breakthrough. Whether that is enough is the question the anniversary cannot quite answer. The Arctic is not waiting: the ice is retreating, sea routes are opening and the world is turning north for minerals, oil and passage, increasing the pressure on the region whether or not the Council can meet to discuss it.

Høegh’s argument is that adaptation is what keeps the Council alive.

“By always adapting to the realities that surround you,” he said, “I think you survive.”

In thirty years, he noted, he will be ninety, and he hopes to be around to see whether he was right.