The Northern Dimension (ND) is an initiative aimed at elevating a programme to the level of a policy. Wilson (2015 ) has delivered a generalised distinction between the two, arguing that while ‘programmes are short-term interventions that create temporary improvements in the wake of challenges . . . policies . . . are covenants we collectively choose to live by’. Thus, the ND as a programme is a number of short-term interventions, which usually take the shape of international projects aimed at tackling one of the challenges that the North faces: a severe climate; vast, sparsely populated territories; and a vulnerable environment. In turn, the ND as a policy is the process of choosing the covenants to live by in the North characterised by those
challenges. Since Finland initiated the ND in the late 1990s, there have been two attempts to elevate the ND to the level of a policy, but in both cases, as this chapter will demonstrate, the ND was reduced back to the level of a programme. Anything can have an ND: historians of the international Communist movement in the early twentieth century write of an ND of the Communist international (Comintern); scholars of literature write of an ND of satire; zoologists of an ND of biodiversity and so on. Of the two attempts to elevate the ND from the level of a programme to that of a policy, one attempted to create an ND policy of the EU, while the other set a more ambitious aim to create an ND policy for the entire world. This chapter begins by demonstrating how the Finnish initiative triggered attempts to build an ND policy of the EU and how those attempts resulted in the transformation of the ND into a programme. It provides an overview of scholarly literature on the ND, including Russian literature in an attempt to understand Russian expectations of the ND. It will discuss the attempt to ‘renew’ the ND into a minilateral policy of the EU, Russia, Norway and Iceland. It links the three major challenges of the North to the four partnerships established under the auspices of the ‘renewed’ ND policy. Further, the chapter highlights the place of each governing body of the ND policy within a system capable of choosing common covenants to live by in the North acceptable for the EU, Russia, Norway and Iceland. It pays attention to the roles of the United States, Canada and Belarus, which are not full partners of the ND, but which have played roles in the formulation and implementation of the ND policy. Finally, it distinguishes between those ND governing bodies which continued working after the 2014 EU–Russia conflict and the bodies which ceased working after 2014. It demonstrates that the bodies responsible for implementing the ND as a programme continued working after 2014, while the work within bodies responsible for the ND as a policy stalled. It then outlines two scenarios regarding how the current situation might develop.