The Arctic Council is an international soft-law institution established in 1996 to address issues of environmental protection and sustainable development in the Arctic. This chapter, which is part of a volume aiming to compile the main pieces of the global environmental governance puzzle, describes the structure, evolution and outputs of the Arctic Council, placing it in the larger context of global environmental governance. The Council’s recent acceptance of six permanent observer applications, including those from China and India, reflects acknowledgement that many activities that produce Arctic environmental challenges occur outside the region or fall under the full or partial jurisdiction of non-Arctic states.