Misreading the Arctic landscape: A political ecology of reindeer, carrying capacities, and overstocking in Finnmark, Norway

Abstract

Sámi reindeer pastoralism in Norway is said to be in a state of crisis that has lasted for several decades and is due to excessive numbers of reindeer. A general overstocking of the range is believed to cause widespread pasture degradation, poor economic performance, and increasing land-use conflicts. These are the main assumptions of a dominant narrative shared by key government and non-governmental actors, most scientists, and the media. The resulting policy focuses on reducing reindeer numbers to set carrying capacities in order to promote ecological sustainability and improve economic performance through the means of increasing carcass weights. The article presents a critical review of the ecological evidence behind the dominant narrative. The authors conclude that the narrative and the associated policy lead to a misreading of the Arctic pastoral landscape that neglects both alternative scientific evidence and interpretations in line with non-equilibrium ecology as well as the indigenous knowledge of the reindeer herders. Hence, such alternative perspectives generally remain invisible to the government institutions that regulate the practice of reindeer management. Further, the authors’ study resonates with wider theoretical debates about state governance within political ecology and development studies in general.

Keywords:

• Norway
• pastoralism
• political ecology
• reindeer

Acknowledgments

This article is a result of the Dávggas project ‘The Economics and Land-Use Conflicts of Sámi Reindeer Herding in Finnmark: Exploring the Alternatives’, which is funded by the Research Council of Norway. We are grateful to all participants in this project for exciting discussions that fed into this manuscript. We also appreciate the comments received from participants at the workshop in Trondheim in December 2013 organised by the Norwegian Network on Political Ecology. Finally, we thank two anonymous reviewers for their thorough and constructive engagement with the argument.

Notes

1 Siida is a customary and flexible management unit including both a community and place-based resources (seasonal pastures and migration routes) (see Sara 2009 for more details).

2 All translations into English have been made by the authors of this article.

3 While Ims & Kosmo (2001) was based on data from the period 1998–2000, a recent MSc thesis replicated their study, but increased the sample to the period 1980–2012 (Borgenvik 2014). Borgenvik found that only 22% of carcass weights of varit and 15% of the weights of calves born the same year could be explained by densities of reindeer.