A Pole Without a Common Framework: The Limits of Regional Governance in the Hindu Kush Himalayas
The world has a governing model for both the North and South Poles – the Antarctic is governed by the Antarctic Treaty System, and the Arctic is governed by the Arctic Council. But the Third Pole, i.e., the Hindu-Kush-Himalayas (HKH), has no such model as it became a battlefield before it could be considered as global commons. The HKH is called the Third Pole. The label is scientifically earned. The HKH is home to the largest area under permanent ice cover in the world, outside the Arctic and Antarctic, and supports ten major river systems, supporting almost two billion people downstream in eight countries – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan. It is as susceptible to climate change as the other poles and like in the other poles, what happens here does not stay here. The label implies that an area with the same consequence as the other poles is worthy of being governed in a manner that is appropriate to its significance.
The issue of regional governance is one that HKH has not confronted yet. An obvious reason given for this is the border disputes and the geopolitical tensions in the region. This obvious reason is a paradox in itself. The Arctic region also has eight countries, and there also exists a disputed area in the Northwest Passage, the Beaufort Sea, and the Lomonosov Ridge. The Arctic Council was built despite those disputes, not in their absence. So, the question is not whether disputes exist. It is about what kind of disputes they are.
Arctic conflicts are maritime in nature. They are regulated by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which sets a common legal structure to establish territorial seas, exclusive economic zones and continental shelf rights. There are disagreements about where the border should lie between countries, but there are no disagreements about the rulebook. It is a common legal base that made the establishment of the Arctic Council possible.
The disputes in the HKH region are land-based. There is no international law like UNCLOS for the mountains. The unresolved border dispute hampers India-China relations. The Line of Control between India and Pakistan runs through territory that both countries claim. India and Nepal also have a disputed area in the Kalapani-Lipulekh region. These disputes do not come under any shared legal framework.
It is tempting to argue that the HKH simply missed its governance window, the way the other poles did not. The Antarctic Treaty was signed in 1959, before there was a greater sense of resource competition. The Arctic Council was established in 1996, post-Cold War, when the UNCLOS had already entered into force. However, this comparison has limits. No one had civilisational ties to Antarctica, and it was ruled by outsiders, a neutral act on neutral ground. The HKH was never neutral ground. For thousands of years, these mountains have been shared among multiple polities and today, among eight countries.
What makes this governance failure urgent is the scale of what is going unaddressed. The HKH is not just facing one issue; it has several overlapping transboundary issues, with no single country able to solve the issue by itself. Glacial melt is speeding up and will impact the long-term freshwater security of almost two billion people, regardless of who owns the glaciers. Glacial lake outburst floods are becoming more common, and when they do burst, they can cause destruction hundreds of kilometres across international borders with no common warning mechanism. The killing of more than 200 people and the destruction of two hydropower projects in Chamoli, Uttarakhand, in 2021, is one example that demonstrates the vulnerability of this region. Black carbon coming out of industries accelerates glacial melt and is not being monitored collectively, whereas the consequences will be borne by every country in the HKH. Such monitoring would require exchanging data between countries and require an umbrella governing organization to facilitate it.
The countries in HKH established ICIMOD in 1983. However, ICIMOD is a research and knowledge-based agency that shares data regarding climate change, and cannot compel countries to act on it or take action because it is not a governance entity. In 2020, the ministers from all eight countries of the HKH signed a historic Ministerial Declaration, pledging to work together and establish a High-Level Task Force to evaluate the potential of a regional institutional mechanism. The Task Force held six meetings. It made a tangible recommendation such as a biennial HKH Ministerial Forum as a high-level decision-making forum. The second Ministerial Summit, where that recommendation was to be tabled, was then to rescheduled but has not taken place yet.
ICIMOD, therefore, failed at just the point where declaration needed to become an institution, where "we agree this matters" needed to become "we agree to be bound by something. China has been a signatory to the 2020 declaration and has the most important role in any meaningful governance framework because among other things, it also holds the maximum area – 47.7% of the total HKH area. However, China has a consistent strategic preference for rejecting multilateral frameworks that it does not control, and shares river information on a selective and bilateral basis on its own terms – for instance, it stopped sharing hydrological data with India since 2022. China's signing of the declaration is not a contradiction to not being bound by the declaration. It is a rational strategy. A country can sign a declaration just because it knows that it will not be binding, because there is no legal floor to make it binding. Signing costs nothing. Binding costs sovereignty.
Creating a legal floor would need negotiations of norms and rules over territory that is already claimed or disputed and militarised between nuclear-armed states. This is not impossible in the abstract but requires a shared recognition that the governance vacuum is more costly than the sovereignty concessions needed to fill it.
The international approach to global climate governance has been that when there is shared scientific urgency, there will be shared political will. That is what the Paris Agreement on climate change is based on. Scientific urgency here is not up for debate. Political declarations have been made but there is still no legally binding governance mechanism.
The governance entity in the HKH would be one that oversees climatic, energy, economic, and geopolitical concerns – a “Himalayan Council” – created by treaty agreement. Like the Arctic Council, it must also represent the indigenous people who are most affected in the region by climate change. The Himalayan Council's true test will be whether the HKH states can translate common climate urgency into long-term, binding collaboration that outlasts their bilateral rivalries.
About the Author: Rhythm Prashar is a PhD student at the Kautilya School of Public Policy and can be reached at [email protected]