Throughput legitimacy in Swedish fisheries governance: Views from coastal fishers

• Many scholars have noted a participatory turn in democratic governance, including in relation to environmental management. The EU and Nordic countries have committed to the participatory ideals outlined in the Aarhus Convention, which give citizens the right to information about, participation in, and pursuit of justice concerning decisions about the environmen . In Sweden and the wider European context, greater levels of stakeholder and citizen participation in environmental decision-making are said to enhance the legitimacy of policy, make policy more responsive to local circumstances, contribute to fairness and consensus-building among differently-situated actors, and increase levels of acceptance and compliance, even in circumstances where outcomes are not viewed as desireable. Yet scholars have also found that European states fail to achieve the level and quality of participation needed to realise these aims. In this paper we investigate Swedish coastal fishers’ experiences of participatory democracy in fisheries governance, drawing on a national survey of commercial fishing license holders and semi-structured interviews with 21 coastal fishers. Taking our cue from scholarship which argues that democratic participation in environmental governance entails more than representation, we analyse coastal fishers’ views of fisheries management through the lens of throughput legitimacy or legitimate throughput. This concept, developed in studies of European politics and policy in the latter half of the 2000s and early 2010s, focuses attention on governance processes, as opposed to institutional design (representation, input) or performance (outcomes). While throughput legitimacy has been used to investigate environmental governance in other European contexts, this study is the first to apply the concept to fisheries governance and to a Swedish environmental agency. Our study shows the concept’s utility for analysing the extent to which “the experience of those who draw fish out of the water” (Chuenpagdee & Jentoft, 2015), p.9) is meaningfully incorporated in Swedish fisheries management. Our case also confirms, as Schmidt and Wood (2019) suggest, that not all of the criteria for throughput legitimacy are equally important to all stakeholders. Finally, our materials also indicate that, contrary to other scholarship, governance processes based on bargaining and agonistic discussions can be perceived as highly legitimate.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi -- Socialantropologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology -- Social Anthropology (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap -- Övrig annan samhällsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences -- Other Social Sciences not elsewhere specified (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

fisheries management

legitimate throughput

democracy

Sweden

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