The contested nature of Allemannsretten - Renegotiating local customs together with small-scale farmers in periphery landscapes (LOCUS)
The Norwegian concept allemannsretten denotes a shared system around the Nordic countries that allows people certain rights and freedoms when it comes to accessing uncultivated land own by others. The freedoms concern people’s right to pass through, rest, and utilize land for berry-picking, fishing, hunting, and the like, if they do so responsibly and with respect for the surroundings. The recent growth and diversification of outdoor recreation has made the right increasingly contested. Farmers and reindeer herders as well as nature guides in Norwegian periphery landscapes feel challenged as ever more people are approaching landscapes to do traditional as well as new outdoor recreation activities. Together with other inhabitants and outdoor recreationalists, they question people’s capability and willingness to use allemannsretten in responsible ways, by showing consideration and due care for other people and vulnerable nature, as the Norwegian Outdoor Recreation Act of 1957 requires.
Conflicts over the use of allemannsretten often concern more than what is juridically correct and include concerns for what is culturally accepted. In the project «The Contested Nature of Allemannsretten», we address this cultural level while aiming to illuminate outdoor recreationalists’ moral enactments of allemannsretten. We do so based on qualitative and ethnographical studies of the geographical and historical specific about how the right is used and sometimes becomes contested. Through this geographical and historical perspective, the research project attends to how flora, fauna and ecologies, everyday life, politics and economic life imprint on moral landscape enactments. People’s capabilities and will to use allemannsretten in responsible ways are considered in light of the climate and nature crisis, increased mobility, commercialization and new technologies that changes the use of landscapes.
In the fieldworks, we experience how understandings of good behaviour in landscapes are changing, both among small-scale farmers in the Reisa Valley in Northern Troms and among nature guides in Lofoten, where our main fieldworks unfold. With reference cases outside Oslo, Norway, and in Finland and Iceland, we ask how the cultural basis for the use of allemannsretten is renegotiated and what is at stake for humans and for flora and fauna within such renegotiations. Along the way, we consider moral landscape dynamics as part of landscape assemblages (cf. Tsing 2005) where humans and more-than-humans meet up, and where different interests, qualities, knowledges and understandings intersect and sometimes are remoulded. As allemannsretten is contested, so is nature. Thus, the moral basis for the use of the right concerns people’s knowledges, their emotional connectedness to landscapes and the responsibility for taking care of nature they experience. In the project «The Contested Nature of Allemannsretten», we acknowledge this experienced based ownership to the climate and nature crisis and supports it through different activities organized together with our cooperative partners.