The other parties are all of the Arctic eight, if you like, or simply the five coastal Arctic countries, if you want to simplify this to begin with. Indeed, let's hold it to the five.
The readiness to cooperate is not great right now. There have been some words and statements made of good wishes and intentions, but the fact is that in the Arctic Council and elsewhere, the five, and indeed the Arctic eight, have confined themselves to studies and statements about guidelines and things that should be done. None of that is mandatory. Though there have been some really good studies—the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, for instance, is a beautiful piece of work, and just recently there's been the Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment 2009 Report, all of which are very good studies of the situation—the follow-on to collective action is not there yet. Because the governments of the region on the whole, like Canada, want to preserve freedom of action, maximize sovereignty, and not to be caught up in extraneous considerations, so to speak, most of them have enough on their table. So there is a problem.
In building the capacity to cooperate, as I say, you could work out a stewardship agenda quite easily, but actually getting people to do the job and to get interested in cooperating is quite another. For that we need the United States and Russia to work—especially Russia. Russia is the antithesis of stewardship in many ways, and how are you going to bring the Russians aboard? They account for about 180° of arc in this region or circle, and they are not very interested in stewardship so far. How are we going to get them on?
There are answers to that. One of the ways, to be quite simple about it, is to exercise bribery. We need to make it easier for them to be stewards. For that, money is required; and for that, non-Arctic countries are required, I think.