New Fish in a New Environment: Challenges to a Comprehensive Management of Fish, Environments and Human Beings

The research project involves a doctorate project which seeks to investigate how the new issues of fish welfare and environmentally contaminated fish are shaped, managed and integrated with established practices in the public administration of fish. The s tarting point for the investigation is that these issues seem to challenge established practices related to what a fish is. The issue of fish welfare suggests that fish is not only a resource important to industrial and commercial development along the co ast, but also an animal. Fish, which for a long time has been considered as healthy food, is now to a greater degree being linked to environmental contaminants, indicating that fish has partly become an environmental issue and a health problem. Hence, int egrating these issues pose challenges to a comprehensive management, both because they challenge existing practices related to fish, but also because they are very complex, involving both environmental, animal and human health-related aspects. We will exp lore how these issues are shaped, managed and integrated by studying two administrative risk assessment processes of fish welfare and environmentally contaminated fish respectively. The site of empirical study will more specifically be the Norwegian admin istration of fish and food which recently has been re-arranged in important ways relevant to these issues. Theoretically the project will combine actor-network theory and a Foucauldian tradition that emphasises the significance of power and knowledge in t he study of administrative processes. The project will be related to the project "Welfare Quality: science and society improving animal welfare", financed by the EU and the Research Council of Norway and the project "Expertise and Consumer Power" financed by the RAMBU-programme of the Research Council, and be a collaboration between Norwegian Agricultural Economics Research Institute and Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo.