Troubling the northern seas: The turbulent history of Norwegian and Russian fisheries

Ch. 10. P. 181–199.

Hohler S., Lajus J., Roberts P., Wrakberg U.

This chapter explores marine resource and environmental governance regimes in the Arctic regions in the twentieth century. We review important trajectories of living and mineral marine resource exploration in Arctic marine environments from a history of science and an environmental history perspective. Starting with the emergence of ocean scientization and internationalization in the early twentieth century we follow the sciences and the technologies of ocean management until the present. We draw on the histories of fisheries, seabed mining and ecosystem-based management schemes with a regional focus on the Barents Sea, the North Sea and the Arctic Ocean. The aims of the chapter are twofold. Firstly, we aim to identify historical path-dependencies understood as opportunities, interventions and oppositions for agency. To this end, we explore the definitions and demarcations of zones and partitions of marine spaces as political, institutional and technoscientific conjunctures. Secondly, we focus on the conceptions of sustainability that informed the boundary drawing processes and emanated from them. The chapter identifies shifting notions of sustainability, from maximum sustained yield to wider concerns with global ecosystem sustenance to sustaining economies as part of environmental responsibilities and protection schemes.

Keywords: Norway, Норвегия, Arctic ocean, history of fisheries, Европейская территория Россия, история Арктики, Рыболовство, European Russia

In book

The Politics of Arctic Resources. Change and Continuity in the "Old North" of Northern Europe

Routledge, 2019.