Menneske og dyr i grenseland – om rettar, rettferd og rett ferd i utmarka

Abstract

In this chapter, we examine how people and animals have co-created borders, land rights and practices in outfields (utmark) in Norway. Further, we examine how this plays a part when change and increasing diversity is managed. We do this by examining conflicts arising between farmers, landowners and reindeer herders in Norway, resulting from policy imperatives towards agricultural diversification. We find that different stakeholders with rights that are relevant in this context may have different capacities to respond when valuations of outfield resources change, and that the human-animal relations in reindeer herding are having a particular impact on these capacities. We argue that the current regulatory system negotiating the interests of different stakeholders with rights struggles to comprehend or deal with issues of animal agency and mobility in reindeer-herding practices. We propose that Haraway’s concept of response-ability can be useful to help make more-than-human agency more visible, and therefore better accounted for, in the unsettling and resettling of property relations in the Norwegian outfields. This allows us to understand more precisely how human-animal relations, in our case relations between reindeer and reindeer herders, affect the responses available to the various stakeholders when land and land-use rights in the outfields are negotiated.