Governing unruly tourism growth in Svalbard ...

Svalbard is experiencing rapid climate and environmental change, putting the socioenvironmental system under stress. At the same time, maritime tourism has, with a brief hiatus during the pandemic, seen almost an exponential growth, challenging the current management regime. Historically, coal minin...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Dale, Ragnhild F., Dannevig, Halvor
Format: Conference Object
Language:unknown
Published: Zenodo 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8369183
https://zenodo.org/record/8369183
Description
Summary:Svalbard is experiencing rapid climate and environmental change, putting the socioenvironmental system under stress. At the same time, maritime tourism has, with a brief hiatus during the pandemic, seen almost an exponential growth, challenging the current management regime. Historically, coal mining has provided the basis for human settlements of Svalbard, but in 2018 the Norwegian government closed the major mine and declared that tourism should be one of the pillars for the main human settlement in Svalbard, Longyearbyen. However, the unrulines of rapid tourism growth, partly enabled by the shrinking polar sea ice, have seen the Norwegian government scrambling to find governance responses to the development, with proposed solutions prompting protests and outrage in Longyearbyen. The proposed legislative changes have no precedent elsewhere in Norway, and the implications for nature conservation management are potentially profound, reshaping the boundaries of Norwegian natural resource management. The ...