Abstract
Technological advances, the geographical and social expansion of markets as well as institutional developments increasing access to capital have resulted in a vast extension of human natural resource harvesting capacities in the twentieth century, and there are few signs that this trend will slow down in the foreseeable future. The questions of biological limits and ecological sustainability have in various ways and to different degrees been placed on the political agendas during the past forty years. It has generally been recognised that this problem must be seen as being the responsibility of political authorities, at least in principle. However, apart from those instances where the state itself owns and manages the means of production it is debarred from managing natural resources directly. It has to manage resources by managing the people who harvest them. In other words, successful resource management requires successful governance of people and thereby a minimum level of knowledge of relevant social processes. Much emphasis has been placed on generating knowledge about the causal connections between the actions of resource harvesters and the state of nature. This is not difficult to understand. The ability to predict important long-term ecological consequences of human activities has so far proven to be limited, and the cases addressed in this study are no exception in this respect.
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Regarding theory as ever developing implies the view that one will hardly ever reach the level of social laws. Mjøset (2001) has argued that the epistemological ambitions of grounded theory diverge from the program of deductive testing of nomological hypotheses, as the former is sceptic to the possibility of accumulating scientific knowledge about social processes.
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© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Gezelius, S.S. (2003). Introduction. In: Regulation and Compliance in the Atlantic Fisheries. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0051-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0051-2_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-3990-1
Online ISBN: 978-94-010-0051-2
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