Rhetoric and hegemony in consumptive wildlife tourism: polarizing sustainability discourses among angling tourism stakeholders

ABSTRACT

Nature-based tourism frequently results in controversies over access rights, but also over how resources should be managed and utilized. In this article, we explore disagreements on management strategies and angling practices, which followed in the wake of the gradual introduction of increasingly strict harvest regulations in salmon angling in the Orkla River of Norway. Different views on what represent the most severe threats to the salmon stock appeared in this case to originate in rather complex patterns with respect to the ways stakeholders related to and engaged with salmon, rivers and nature in general. The identification of incompatible goals and motives of various categories of stakeholders has for long been a dominant approach in research on these types of conflicts. In this contribution, we broaden the scope by exploring how such controversies involve competition for hegemony with respect to how management and angling practices should be discursively framed.

KEYWORDS:

• Fishing tourism
• harvest regulations
• nature-based tourism
• conflicts
• hegemony and collaborative management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In Norway, as with many other European countries, the fishing right is a private property right and belongs to whoever owns the land adjacent to the water, cf. the Norwegian Salmonids and Freshwater Fish Act of 1992. In this article, the owners of fishing rights are small-scale private riparian landowners, unless otherwise stated. This is similar to small-scale forest owners, sometimes referred to as non-industrial or family forest owners (Harrison, Herbohn, & Niskanen, 2002).

2. A beat is defined as the length of river or bank, let or fished as a unit by angling (McLay & Gordon-Rogers, 1997).

3. The regulations are based on empirically set spawning targets, measured as the number of or weight of female salmon left after the fishing season, in order to fully recruit the river with juveniles based on its carrying capacity (see Hindar et al., 2011).

4. In 2012, the harvest restrictions/quotas per angler for the Orkla River were a daily limit of one salmon, a seasonal quota of eight salmon (in which four could be over 80 cm), and that female salmon must be released in August. Sea trout were a no-take.

Additional information

Funding

Norges Forskningsråd [208056]; Norwegian Environmental Agency [2013/1686-21052013].

Notes on contributors

Hogne Øian

Hogne Øian (PhD in social anthropology) is a research fellow at Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA). His main research interests concern social and ecological sustainability issues related to outdoor recreation and nature-based tourism.

Øystein Aas

Øystein Aas is head of research at Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in Norway (NINA), and adjunct professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. His main research interests concern human dimensions of fisheries and wildlife, and social acceptance of renewable energy.

Margrete Skår

Margrete Skår (PhD in human geography) is a senior research fellow at Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in Norway (NINA). Her main research interests are urban outdoor recreation, human–environment interactions and nature experiences in the context of everyday life.

Oddgeir Andersen

Oddgeir Andersen (PhD in applied ecology) is a research fellow at The Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA). His main research interests concern nature-based tourism and harvest management of natural resources.

Stian Stensland

Stian Stensland is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Ecology and Natural Resource Management, Norwegian University of Life Sciences. His main research interests are nature-based tourism, natural resources management, and the human dimensions of sport fisheries.