Model Arctic Council Conference in Norwich

March 14th 2025

Last week, seven of our pupils - three ‘MUNers’ and four geographers - had the privilege of attending a Model Arctic Council Conference in Norwich (NORMAC), accompanied by the wonderful Dr. Greatham and Ms. Latham. NORMAC is the only conference of its kind, being a standalone Model Artic Council (MAC) conference for secondary school students.

MAC is a simulation of the Arctic Council in which students represent one of the eight Arctic states or six permanent participants (Indigenous groups). At NORMAC, our students from Alleyn’s represented Sweden and the Aleut International Association.

Not to be confused with Model United Nations (MUN), MAC is a rigorous conference, requiring a high level of maturity from delegates as they negotiate with one another and agree on solutions to tackle the issues that threaten the Arctic.

The conference began on Thursday evening with the opening ceremony, during which all heads of delegations gave speeches about their hopes and goals for the conference. On Friday, we launched straight into working group sessions, where we discussed the topics of renewable energy development in the Arctic and the Last Ice Area. The purpose of these sessions was to determine the ‘crux’ of each issue and to understand where delegates had disagreements on the topics. As the working group meetings had very little structure, students had to demonstrate leadership to ensure these discussions were as efficient as possible.

Following this, we moved on to the Senior Arctic Officials (SAO) meetings, where we faced the daunting task of creating a declaration for each topic by drafting clauses and making amendments to accommodate all delegations’ wishes. These meetings followed excessively formal rules of procedure, and we quickly learned the importance of using informal discussions to help us reach the consensus necessary for clauses to be passed into the declaration. We had the honour of being chaired by Dr. Speca, the founder of MAC, who is incredibly knowledgeable and passionate about the Arctic.

That evening, we exercised our skills in ‘gastrodiplomacy’ at the formal dinner in the stunning Assembly House, and on Saturday, we were back to debating.

The conference concluded with the Ministerial Meeting, where delegates voted for or against the declaration they had written together. Unfortunately, the declaration for the Sustainable Development Working Group was not passed due to objections from the Indigenous groups, but we managed to pass the declaration on the Last Ice Area - a very rewarding feeling after spending so many hours working on it!

Maya G (Year 12)

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