Mange politiske mål på få mål jord - ein analyse av partipolitikkens rolle i forvaltinga av norske jordressursar

The point of departure for this thesis is the inconsistency between national goals to conserve farmland, and the local management of this natural resource, which prevents Norway from complying with its national goals. The research question is: What role do party politics play in the management of Norwegian land resources? The state wants a high level of food security, and therefore needs land to be conserved for food production purposes. On the other hand many municipalities are experiencing growth and have needs for houses, industries, public buildings and infrastructure. According to theory on multi-level democracy the state will apply hard governmental tools when there is a conflict between national and local goals. Even though such a conflict exists in this case, I find that local politicians have a relatively large room for manoeuvre in the management of farmland. I expect the parties’ agricultural ideology and municipal ideology to play out in how local politicians manage farmland. By content analysis of the party programs I place the parties along these two cleavages and find that the political parties do differ considerably on how strongly agricultural property should be regulated, and how much power should be decentralised on issues concerning land use. Through a survey question on land use in the seventh round of the Norwegian Citizen Panel I further find that respondents differ in the same way as the parties they would vote for along the cleavage of agricultural ideology. Still, regression analysis on farmland conversion in Norwegian municipalities shows that none of the cleavages have a statistically significant effect on the local management of farmland. To find out why this is not the case, I execute a comparative case study of the two municipalities of Spydeberg and Hobøl. They are chosen through a Most Similar Systems Design as they are equal in every geographic and demographic respect, but they converted a very different amount of farmland in the four-year-period before and after 2011. Both also experienced a change in party leadership in 2011, and therefore reflect the apparent lacking party effect on local management of farmland. By interviewing politicians and others working with farmland conversion, I find that most of them consider party politics to be very important locally, even though it is not reflected in how much farmland that is actually converted. The main finding of the thesis is that conservation of farmland is weighted in a local context, not in a party political one