Litt av en prosess 40 år med omorganisering av norsk kulturminneforvaltning

Abstract

Some process: 40 years of re-organising Norwegian archaeology The main objective of this paper is to investigate the historical background of the so-called ‘regionreform’ recently proposed by the Norwegian Government with special emphasis on the Cultural Heritage Management (CHM). The paper presents a critical inquiry into re-organisations within the Norwegian CHM in the 1980- and 90’s, a process known within academic research and official State documents simply as ‘the re- organisation’. The re-organisation involved four vital events: (1) the transformation of the Directorate for Cultural Heritage into a central body in the administration and located directly below the Department of Environmental Protection in 1988, (2) the de-centralisation of the district authority from the university museums to the county councils in 1990, (3) the creation of NIKU (The Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research) in 1994, and (4) the displacement of exempt authority from the university museums to the Directorate in 2001. The paper focuses on the political processes these events were part of, especially on political strategies, discursive turning points and speech acts, drawing on theoretical and methodological aspects from Actor-Network-Theory. It is found that the ideas and strategies that were realised through ‘the re-organisation’ dated back to academic circles and cultural policies forged in the 1960- and 1970’s. It is concluded that the ‘regionreform’ was formed within a new network of textual references, but that the ideas behind it is thoroughly connected with the old re-organisation, and thus to discursive elements from the 1960’s.