The ambivalent nature of biodiversity: Scientists' perspectives on the Norwegian Nature Index

Abstract

The Norwegian Nature Index is intended to provide an overview of the state of biodiversity in Norway. From the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, the author explores how biologists make sense of biodiversity and how they identify scientific uncertainty in the context of the Nature Index. Anchoring and themata are employed as tools for analysis in the investigation of scientists' representation of the Nature Index and its subject matter, namely biodiversity. In-depth interviews indicated that most of the scientists perceived the results as intuitively sound, but they also revealed an outspoken ambivalence about compressing complex ecological relationships into standardized numbers. In covering both natural and cultural landscapes as habitats for biodiversity, there seems to be a symbolic mismatch between the operationalization of biodiversity in the index and the intuitive anchoring of biodiversity as ‘untouched’ nature. Hence, the thematizing of the divide between the untouched and what is human may be seen as a form of conceptual uncertainty underlying the Nature Index.

Keywords:

• biodiversity
• nature index
• social representations
• themata
• uncertainty

Acknowledgements

I thank the informants for sharing with me their thoughts about the Nature Index. I also thank my colleague, Erik Framstad, as well as editor Anders Lundberg and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of the article. The research was funded by the Norwegian Directorate for Nature Management.

Notes

1. In order to preserve the informants’ anonymity, all extracts from the interviews have been presented together with a code consisting of a letter and a number. The only purpose of the coding was to enable the author to retrace the parts of the data from which the citations are extracted.

2. Mentioned in the Norwegian Government's ‘Political platform for a majority government’ negotiated at Soria Moria 26 September – 13 October 2005 (Statsministerens kontor 2012, 330).