Changing Cultural Landscapes around the Jostedalsglacier (West Norway), from Cultural Landscape Management to Cultural Landscape Governance – a Future Path?

Abstract

Study Aim <br /> The present research focuses on the question how to design future cultural landscape management and cultural landscape dynamics. Cultural landscape change, as it takes place in West Norway, gains increased rapidity and displays partly irreversible processes. Driving factors (such as climate, demographics, sectoral change and agricultural production) substantiate the change and transform over centuries grown summer farming cultural landscapes based on a vertical land use gradient in the vicinity of the Josetdalsglacier. Admitting large fiscal expenditures and political attempts to manage the summer farming landscapes, the successive overgrowing ('gjengroing') advances and impairs visibility. A local identity anchor and immense potential for tourism and regional development are at stake likewise. <br /> Theory and Methods<br /> The study combines institutional, commodity and governance theory to constitute local cultural landscape identity, communication and action arenas on the example of Briksdalen, Bødalen and Erdalen in Stryn Municipality. There, a cultural landscape governance can take place. Governance describes the process, where the state is resigning from its monopoly functions regarding cultural landscape management and integrates non-governmental participants. Cultural landscape history, change of cultural landscapes, driving factors, stakeholders and cultural landscape institutions are investigated. Document search and guideline based expert interviews comprise the empirical fundament of such a governance based access. To examine a possible correspondence between a reflexive-discursive approach in science to normative policy and planning strategies, the data corpus sustained institutional, discourse and governance analysis.<br /> Results<br /> The inquired cultural landscape history refers to a unique cultural landscape pattern in the close vicinity of the Jostedalsglacier (identity arena). Formal institutions (such as acts, regulations and financial allocation systems) signify the basis for sectoral policies (agriculture, cultural heritage, nature protection, tourism, spatial planning and rural development) of contemporary care-taking, safeguarding and management efforts regarding the cultural landscapes on-site. They define cultural landscape management rules in manifold ways. The primary sector materialises as the principal cultural landscape management operator. In various cases, the top-down organised institutional framework reinforces the cultural landscape change on-site. Conflicts, dilemmas, paradoxes and discourses about the present management, the future development, the use and the valorisation of cultural landscapes emerge (communication arena) among three logics of action (hierarchy, market and solidarity). Non-administrative stakeholders’, who perform active cultural landscape management are, in contrary to administrative stakeholders, mainly driven by informal institutions (e.g. ontological settings, reifications and values). A compatibility intolerance of cultural landscape management is detected.<br /> Conclusions<br /> Several governance modes, such as revitalising old traditions (goat farming) and the introduction and branding of the toponym 'Inner Nordfjordscape' are forthcoming promising accesses for future cultural landscape management approaches (action arena) to contain the 'gjengroing' in the case study valleys. Present efforts in tourism and nature conservation mark the fundament of such governance attempts. Successive overgrowing occurs as a window of opportunity to widen cultural landscape management concepts.