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When the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) was released in 2004, the Arctic became the first international region for a full-scale analysis of the impacts of climate change. Signs of climate change effects and ACIA?s focus on implications for indigenous peoples in the circumpolar North received large media coverage and shifted the emphasis in the framing of climate change from global climate-model averages to regional and local vulnerabilities. Based on an in-depth study of the ACIA-process, this paper discusses the forces behind this shift. It focuses on the interplay between scientific and political processes and the role of international regional regimes in allowing new actors into climate policy and knowledge production. It particularly analyzes the role of indigenous peoples? organizations, their relations to state actors, and how these relations were shaped by norms within a regional international regime: the Arctic Council. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]