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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Norwegian electrochemical and metallurgical companies reacted to critiques of marine pollution from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, and seeks to explain the measures taken to reduce industrial pollution of Norwegian fjords and coastal waters.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how Norwegian electrochemical and metallurgical companies reacted to critiques of marine pollution from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, and seeks to explain the subsequent measures taken to reduce industrial pollution of Norwegian fjords and coastal waters.

In order to explain the extensive pollution reduction in similar Swedish industries, business historians (Söderholm et al 2022; Bergquist & Söderholm 2011) have recently pointed to the combination of a trust-based bargaining system and concomitant pragmatic environmental licensing practices, and a green innovation system initiated by industrial companies. As a consensus-oriented political system with compromise-seeking public advisory committees (e.g., Hesstvedt 2020) and extensive industry representation in environmental governing bodies (Asdal 2015), one would expect these findings to apply to the Norwegian case as well.

The paper does find notable similarities with the Swedish case. As Uekötter (2009) indicated in studies of German and American air pollution control, however, trust-based cooperation between regulators and businesses often required the threat of less congenial alternatives. The paper therefore also explores why businesses would want to participate in trust-based environmental bargaining systems in the first place, and why companies in some cases even went “beyond compliance” (Rome 2020). Drawing on notions of public technologies (Trischler and Bud 2018) and sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2009), the paper highlights 1) environmentalists’, labor unions’ and municipal governments’ involvement in technological choices, 2) managers’ and shareholders’ interpretations and anticipations of public opinion, and 3) bourgeoning visions of alternative industrial uses of the fjords, in particular aquaculture.