Reconciling local control with appropriate scale in Norwegian moose management

ABSTRACT

In a landscape of fragmented private ownership, the need to coordinate game management across large areas presents challenges for landowners and public agencies alike. This paper describes how a recent reorganization of moose management in Norway achieves landscape-level planning while maintaining a tradition of local management by hunting teams. These two seemingly contradictory imperatives – coordinating wildlife management across large areas while keeping benefits and control in the hands of local resource users – are resolved through a nesting of management institutions, wherein the state serves a regulatory function and mid-level government (the county) serves to facilitate inter-local cooperation. This paper documents how the system is structured and describes the balance of incentives that enable the system to work. Information was gathered via interviews with staff at the Norwegian Directorate for Nature Management (now called the Norwegian Environment Agency), with wildlife management officials at the municipal level, with hunters, and from the most recent regulatory documents.

KEYWORDS:

• Wildlife management
• subsidiarity
• community-based natural resource management
• cross-boundary management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Matthew Hoffman is a Fulbright Scholar at the Norwegian Centre for Rural Research in Trondheim. His research program-best characterized as a sociology of rural landscapes and livelihoods-often focuses on cooperation in natural resource management. Hoffman received his PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University.

Bjørn Egil Flø is a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research (NIBIO), Division Food Production and Society, Department of Economy and Social Research. Flø holds a PhD in Sociology from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

ORCID

Matthew Hoffman http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8546-3714

Additional information

Funding

Support for this research was provided by the U.S.-Norway Fulbright Foundation for Educational Exchange.