Bjørn Egil Flø

Landscapes lost? Tourist understandings of changing Norwegian rural landscapes.

Abstract Rural landscapes are the product of consumption for increasing numbers of tourists from urban areas. Many Nordic rural landscapes face a situation called spontaneous reforestation: as mowing and grazing have almost come to an end, scrub and trees thrive. The national tourism industry is concerned, leaning on the assumption that well-managed agricultural landscapes are central to Norways touristic appeal. This article seeks to investigate how tourists understand and make sense of the landscapes they visit. It presents findings from qualitative interviews with 75 domestic and international tourists, conducted in three different study areas in Norway that are prone to spontaneous reforestation. The tourists were asked to describe the surrounding landscape and to reflect upon the meaning of the landscape and the different landscape elements. Manipulated photos of the past and probable future development were brought into the interview to aid reflection. A main finding is that landscape elements that the tourists perceive as threatened seem to be preferred over those experienced as plentiful. Another important finding is how the tourists in our study in different ways tend to make sense of the landscapes they visit through their understanding of their known landscapes. Lastly, we find that understandings of landscape change processes are embedded into wider discourses of nature and culture.

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.