The Privatization of a Norwegian Common Pool Resource: The Role of the State

Abstract

"Game populations normally satisfy the standard definition of a common pool resource. Still, little has been written about the management of game in the literature on European common pool resources.

"In this paper we will study the development of the Norwegian Moose Management regime during the last 500 years. To which extent and in which ways has the resource been privatized? What have the drivers of this privatization process been, and what role has the state played? We will also discuss the successes and failures of the policies that have been implemented at various stages of this process.

"Due to overexploitation, the Norwegian moose population was almost wiped out during the 17th century. In spite of several state interventions aimed at reducing the hunting pressure, the size of the moose population remained at a relatively low level until after the Second World War.

In the beginning of the 19th Century, the government introduced a law that attached moose hunting rights to landownership. This can be considered as the first phase of a privatization process. The second phase came after the Second World War with the introduction of a new Hunting Law that provided each landowner with an exclusive ownership right to portions of local felling quotas. In actual fact, however, the outcome is a combination of private ownership, state control, and local commons arrangements, since the right to determine the total number of shooting permits in an area is held by the state, and since the quota system forces the landowners to cooperate in order to use their ownership rights.

"The new management regime has resulted in a major increase in the moose population, and the number of bagged animals increased from less than 1000 annually in 1900 to almost 40.000 a century later.

"The relative success of the Norwegian moose management regime can be ascribed to the combination of state intervention and privatization. Alternatively, the game resources could have been made state property. There are probably several reasons why this alternative was rejected. In the 19th Century the landowners elected 2/3 of the members of the Norwegian Parliament, and state confiscation of commons was not a feasible alternative. The state was also far too weak to be able to implement a successful management regime without giving local farmers incentives to participate in the monitoring process by giving them ownership rights."