Barents Studies: Peoples, Economies and Politics (Oct 2018)
Licence to pollute:Stakeholders’ suggestions for
Abstract
The Earth system is threatened by the continuous growth and expanding scope of human activity. At the same time, offshore petroleum operations in the Arctic are increasing the burdens on vulnerable marine ecological systems. In research on offshore industries, the environmental focus is on contributions to climate change and “worst-case scenarios” of oil spills. An undesirable implication of such spills is that other common polluting operations escape critical review, also due to a predominant marginalistic approach to considering environmental problems. In the wake of economic activities and industries expanding into increasingly more exposed and vulnerable areas, the article centres on the discharge of drilling waste from petroleum operations in the Barents Sea. The purpose of the qualitative research is to present suggestions for environmental improvements to the Norwegian regime for discharging drilling waste. A theory of definite stakeholders is applied to bring together the most crucial views on the increased pollution. The principal result is a suggestion to enhance ecological integrity by changing the decision-making system regarding permission to pollute. The authors conclude that the applied systemic methodology yields new knowledge and salient policy recommendations for a part of the Barents Sea petroleum regime that has been less studied to date.
