Suchergebnisse

The aquaculture industry in Norway currently represents 60% (US$ 5.4 billion) of Norwegian seafood exports. Of these, farmed Atlantic Salmon ( Salmo sala r) represents over 80% (850,000 tons). These production levels are driven by a strong and growing demand for farmed fish, and has a stated political goal of increased growth by a factor of 5 by 2050 in Norway alone. However, growth is potentially more challenging without the public support and trust in the governance regime that regulates the industry. The theoretical framework of this paper rests on accountability theory, whereby the research team highlighted and tested the paradox between the ideal and the actual practices on a group of stakeholders representing the aquaculture industry and municipal, regional, and sector management in northern Norway relative to their interactions and need thereof—vs. the expectations of the public. The findings of a workshop were used to develop a conceptual model and test our theory on stakeholder driven future scenarios using a combination of systems thinking and fuzzy cognitive mapping. We found that stakeholders and management alike in a workshop setting valued flexibility of legislation and expert opinions highly, whereby regulatory standardization is not prioritized—in line with soft accountability. The industry acknowledged, though, that the public perception and negative media attention of the industry, in turn depended on hard accountability.

Climate change affects the marine environment at all levels of governance. At a global level, researchers expect the projected increase in sea surface temperature to facilitate large changes in the marine food web, which in turn will affect both global fisheries and aquaculture. At the local level, government and stakeholders want to know whether and how this affects their local communities and their adaptive capacity in light of this. Research suggests that risk communication of the effects of changes in the marine food web suffers from stakeholders' short-term mentality and narrow boundaries. This in turn can lead to an underestimation of the potential risks associated with climate change. We explore this theory by mapping the perceptions of marine stakeholders in the region of Troms, Norway. We first developed cognitive maps in a workshop setting, and then used system conceptualization to analyze the feedback mechanisms of the system qualitatively using fuzzy cognitive mapping. We examined the outcomes and compared them for different scenarios using a simple MatLab script. Results demonstrated that stakeholders did not underestimate their risks to climate change. They were aware of environmental changes, and they perceived that a changing climate was the cause of this change, and that it was indeed affecting their livelihoods-and would continue to do so in the future.