The proposed paper presents the first results of a starting research project on the change of policies in Arctic State's Navies and Coast Guards. As the Arctic Ocean is opening up, Navies and Coast Guards of the Arctic state's have reacted in different ways to the emerging security and safety challenges of new Arctic Ocean usages. The paper first seeks to pinpoint these policy changes and as far as possible also already to distinguish between mere rhetoric and actual policies 'on the ground'. The ultimate goal of the paper is to explain the variation in policy change between the different Coast Guards and Navies and to set out the possible implications for the security environment in the Arctic region. However, an intermediate step to this goal is to compare the national Coast Guard's and Navy's policy change to the respective Arctic state's overarching national Arctic strategies in order to check whether these already constitute a frame for the respective variations. The paper thus undertakes an in-depths content analysis of the national Arctic strategies and seeks to trace their influence on the Coast Guard's and Navy's policy changes by contrast for instance to being influenced by independently changing defense and security concerns or other specific government priorities.
