- Assessor: Professor Malcolm Langford, University of Oslo
- Leader of the assessment: Deputy Head of Department, Associate Professor Anders Løvlie, University of Oslo
- Supervisors: Professor Jon Christian Nordrum and Inger Johanne Sand, University of Oslo, and Kjersti Eline Busch, SALT.
About the dissertation
The topic of the dissertation is the license and enforcement system in the Norwegian fisheries legislation. The main objective is to analyse to what extent this regulatory system provides for environmental sustainability, and at the same time secure a clear and predictable exercise of authority.
The project is currently structured in three sub-studies.
The first study is to analyse whether there is a unique Norwegian fisheries legislation culture, what such a possible culture constitutes, and what is its epistemic foundations. The methodology will be legal historical analysis of primary and secondary sources.
The second study is a comparative analysis of the current licence and enforcement system in Norway and in the pacific region in Canada (basically in the province of British Columbia). The study will include historical and cultural context to the degree possible. The aim is to reveal similarities and differences in the regulatory schemes in two jurisdictions based on different legal tradition. More specifically, the aim is to gain new insights on how the Canadian regulatory scheme is organized, and some of the main provisions, to prevent overfishing, high-grading and other criminal offences.The intention is not to fully understand the Canadian system, but to review the Norwegian legislation with a new and outside perspective. The study will be a combination of doctrinal and comparative study of current law and some legal historical analysis. This will include desk studies of authoritative legal sources and literature, and a collection of empirical data through interviews with researchers, actors in the government and the industry.
The third study is a prescriptive policy analysis of the fisheries legislation. The aim is to review findings from the previous studies in a broader societal context and use theories from other disciplines, including resource economics, legal sociology, political science, resource management theory, to evaluate the licence and enforcement system in Norway.