Sammendrag
Debates on future resource policy in northern regions raises the
question of who are the legitimate stakeholders to include in policy
deliberations? The Lofoten archipelago in Northern Norway is a
world-class nature tourism destination, the key spawning ground for
North Atlantic cod as well as a reservoir of large unexploited offshore
oil and gas deposits. We surveyed the resident Lofoten
population and the larger Norwegian public to ascertain to what
extent local and national perceptions of the value of selected
environmental attributes and the importance of drivers of
environmental change align across geographic scales. Lofoten
residents and the national public both assign high value to
environmental attributes, but local residents place more emphasis on
harvesting marine and agricultural resources than the national
public, which is more concerned with the status of individual species
and conservation symbols. Our results show that the national public
expresses so much interest in Lofoten that they should be
considered a legitimate stakeholder in discussions about its future
development paths, and while they relate to the area in a broadly
similar way, there may be some specific areas of conflict that need to
be considered.
Lofoten; drivers of change;
natural resources; local and
national perceptions
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