The Role of the Norwegian Coast Guard in Control Management: Discourse or Guns?

• Main Author: Honneland, Geir B.
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: unknown
• Published: 1995
• Subjects: IASC; fisheries; resource management; coastal resources; tragedy of the commons; Barents Sea
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10535/333

"In keeping with the tradition from Garrett Hardin's The Tradedy of the Commons (1968), controlling the harvesting of natural resources has been viewed as an element of power utilization: authorities survey the observance of regulations in order to punish violators. This paper includes another aspect of enforcement in marine fisheries. Control bodies may reach their goal of preserving the resource basis by seeking to increase the legitimacy of fishery regulations among fishermen. The traditional view of enforcement implies a control activity based on coercion, where fishermen are threatened by economic sanctions if revealed in violation. An enforcement based on discursive actions, on the other hand, seeks to influence fishermen's behaviour by appealing to their reason and their trust in the righteousness of regulations. "These theoretic approaches will be further elaborated in the first part of this paper. Subsequently, a brief outline is given of the organization of fisheries control in the Barents Sea, as well as the jurisdictional and management framework it operates within. In the last part of the paper, relevant tendencies in the violation statistics of the Norwegian Coast Guard is presented, and this empirical material is discussed in view of the theoretical focus of the paper. Of special interest here is the fact that various parts of the Barents Sea have different jurisdictional status, rendering the preconditions for control activities in the various zones different. To the extent that the statistics of the Coast Guard in effect reflect the actual behaviour of fishermen, statistical variances may give us an indication of how different types of enforcement approaches affect fishermen's observance of rules."