Paper short abstract:

What would it take to administer new socio-technical resources, such as farmed salmon or health data, as collective goods? This presentation investigates what we can learn from Norwegian oil politics' financial public returns in regards of collective ownership and control.

Paper long abstract:

With the example of oil politics, Norway has an interesting history of administering a resource as collective good, financially speaking. With petroleum production eventually phasing out, both health data and farmed salmon are mentioned as part of a future bioeconomy that shall replace Norway’s oil economy. Public funding into biotechnology, medicine, or aquaculture, and public investments in health data infrastructures support this development. However, Mazzucato (2013) showed that states often fall short on cashing in on financial rewards from such public funding.

What would it take to administer new socio-technical resources, such as farmed salmon or health data, as collective goods? To answer this question, this presentation investigates what we can learn from Norwegian oil politics in terms of collectivizing goods. Obviously, there are serious environmental costs in oil extraction. However, I think there is something to learn in terms of thinking ownership and collective control that can help us imagine the governance of new sociotechnical resources beyond assetization. I argue that sociotechnical formations incentivizing collective goods do not only encompass governance and legal efforts, but as well as a politics of belonging which is both about constructing and contesting collectivities and collectiveness.