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Introduction
I work at the intersection of social science and ecology with a focus on natural resources use. I've worked quantitatively and qualitatively to understand Saami reindeer herders (Norway) and nomadic pastoralists in Tibet. More recently, I have been using a comparative approach to investigate: (1) the rationale and consequences of governmental management policies; (2) the effects of climate change; and (3) how governmental management policies may exacerbate the negative effects of climate change.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
August 2014 - December 2015
February 2011 - July 2014
February 2005 - June 2009
Education
February 2005 - December 2009
Department of Social Anthropolgy, University of Tromsø
Field of study
- Anthropology
August 1999 - June 2003
Department of Social Anthropolgy, University of Tromsø
Field of study
- Anthropology
Publications
Publications (62)
Mobility has been argued to be the single factor explaining why some pastoralists do relatively well during extreme climatic events, while others do not, because mobility works by taking advantage of the spatial and temporal structure of resource failure by moving away from scarcity towards abundance. In spite of this, a common governmental managem...
A growing body of evidence shows that for nomadic pastoralists herd accumulation is an efficient strategy for buffering environmental variation and maximizes long-term survival. Pastoralists may thus view livestock as investments, or ‘banks on the hoof,’ that work as insurance against unpredictable environmental conditions. This perspective differs...
Cooperative behaviors evolve by ultimately increasing the inclusive fitness of performers as well as recipients of those behaviors.
Such increases can occur via direct or indirect fitness benefits, theoretically explained by reciprocal altruism and kin selection,
respectively. However, humans are known for cooperating with individuals who are not n...
The evolution of political complexity is a perennial issue in humanities and social sciences. While social inequality is pervasive in contemporary human societies, there is a view that livestock, as the primary source of wealth, limits the development of inequalities, making pastoralism unable to support complex or hierarchical organisations. Thus,...
The collapse of the Tana salmon fishery in Norway has had significant socioeconomic consequences for the Saami and local people living along the river. This study investigates the potential link between a collapsing fishery and the breakdown of social networks. Using a combination of interviews, Net-Maps, and an allocation game, we collected data f...
In an era marked by accelerating climate change, habitat loss, and shifting land use patterns, it is crucial to understand the intricate effects of multiple stressors on ecosystems. This long‐term study sheds light on the complex interplay between grazing and habitat characteristics on pasture dynamics and offers insights into how various stressors...
The sustainable management of common resources such as wild Atlantic salmon in the Tana River, Norway, is a significant challenge, as it involves a public goods dilemma where individual interests can conflict with collective interests. This study explores local perceptions of common pool resource management in the Tana River using vignettes charact...
The outbreak of COVID-19 has had an enormous impact on most of society. The most effective measure to prevent the spread has been reducing mobility, which is especially problematic for pastoralists relying on mobility to follow the movement of their livestock. We investigated to what degree Norwegian reindeer husbandry and the reindeer husbandry ma...
Kin relations have a strong theoretical and empirical basis for explaining cooperative behavior. Nevertheless, there is growing recognition that context—the cooperative environment of an individual—also shapes the willingness of individuals to cooperate. For nomadic pastoralists in Norway, cooperation among both kin and non-kin is an essential pred...
Social inequality is pervasive in contemporary human societies. Nevertheless, there is a view that livestock, as the primary source of wealth, limits the development of inequalities, making pastoralism unable to support complex or hierarchical organisations. Thus, complex nomadic pastoral organisation is predominantly caused by external factors, i....
The Sami siida has been described as an organizational institution tailored to meet the dynamic demands of reindeer herding. Historically, it has been characterized as a relatively small group based on kinship. It was formed around a core sibling group and distinguished by a norm of equality where herding partners were equals regardless of social s...
The pastoral literature place little emphasis on the cooperative aspect of being a pastoralist. Part of the neglect stems from conflating the livestock owning unit, i.e. the household, with the herding group. Among Tibetan pastoralists, the herding group consist of people and animals from one or several households. They herd in groups because there...
The Saami siida has been described as an organisational institution tailored to meet the dynamic demands of reindeer herding. Historically, it has been characterised as a relatively small group based on kinship. It was formed around a core sibling group and distinguished by a norm of equality where herding partners were equals regardless of social...
Herding can be characterized as a coordination game with two strategies for minimising risk: increase herd size (livestock quantity) or increase livestock body mass (livestock quality). In this paper I demonstrate that the selection of herd maximisation as a risk management strategy in the Northern parts of Norway has been influenced by a history o...
The cooperative aspect of being a pastoralist has been given little emphasis in the literature. Part of the neglect stems from conflating the livestock owning unit, i.e. the household, with the herding group. Among Tibetan pastoralists the herding group consist of people and animals from one or several households. They herd in groups because there...
The history of humanity is a story of cooperation. Issues pertaining to the origin of human cooperation have, however, been characterized by a forager bias, the assumption being that they have a close link to our evolutionary past. In contrast little effort has been spent on documenting and explaining cooperative herding among nomadic pastoralists....
Herding can be characterized as a coordination game with two strategies for minimising risk: increase herd size (livestock quantity) or increase livestock body mass (livestock quality). In this paper I demonstrate that the selection of herd maximisation as a risk management strategy in the Northern parts of Norway has been influenced by a history o...
Migration, especially of indigenous peoples, related to or influenced by climate change continues to gain increasing research and policy attention. Limited material remains for this topic for Scandinavia’s indigenous people, the Saami. This paper contributes to filling this gap by providing a review for the Scandinavian Saami of the possible impact...
Pastoralists rely on networks of cooperating households containing relatives and others to help with production and various other daily activities. To understand how socioecological differences and commonalities affect different social networks, we compared cooperative decision-making using gift games for 755 people working in herding groups across...
The nomads in the northwestern parts of Tibet rely on sheep, goats and yaks for making a living. Today goats are mainly kept for surplus purposes, while sheep and yak are kept for subsistence purposes. The implementation of the new economic reform policy in Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) by the end of the Cultural Revolution brought the nomads in TA...
Cooperation evolves on social networks and is shaped, in part, by norms: beliefs and expectations about the behaviour of others or of oneself. Networks of cooperative social partners and associated norms are vital for pastoralists, such as Saami reindeer herders in northern Norway. However, little is known quantitatively about how norms structure p...
Supplementary Information for ‘The narrow gap between norms and cooperative behaviour in a reindeer herding community‘
This chapter is concerned with the somewhat puzzling fact that, from a global point of view, pastoral adaptation to climate change is challenged by official policies: notably, large-scale privatisation programs changing land tenure systems from commons to smaller, private grazing areas. Privatisation has been advocated as a way to counter herder-in...
Spatiotemporal reindeer population fluctuations are a result of multiple factors that working in concert affecting the structure and functioning of many Arctic and Sub-Arctic ecosystems. We investigated the population dynamics of Swedish semi-domestic reindeer from 1945 to 2012 at the reindeer herding district-level (Sameby) to identify possible po...
Cooperation is an integral part of nomadic pastoralism. Reindeer herders in Norway are, for example, organized in groups, called siida, that share the workload in connection with herding and other reindeer related work. Globally, the cooperative nature of herding is changing due to privatisation programs changing land tenure systems from commons to...
Many social interactions create a tension between individual and collective interests, known as social dilemmas. Pastoralists, whose livelihoods depend on cooperation within and between herding groups, face a range of social dilemmas in their daily lives. Evolutionary theory predicts that social dilemmas will be solved (i.e. individuals will cooper...
Cooperative behaviours must ultimately increase the inclusive fitness of actors as well as recipients in order to evolve. At the proximate level, mechanisms for encouraging and maintaining cooperation include kin discrimination, limited dispersal as well as direct and indirect reciprocity, among others. Here, we aim to quantify the relative importa...
For long-lived organisms, the fitness value of survival is greater than that of current reproduction. Asymmetric fitness rewards suggest that organisms inhabiting unpredictable environments should adopt a risk-sensitive life history, predicting that it is adaptive to allocate resources to increase their own body reserves at the expense of reproduct...
Temporal trends in climate and reindeer abundance.
Parameter estimates.
Using GAMs to assess temporal trends.
Analysing the effect of pastoral risk management strategies provides insights into a system of subsistence that have persevered in marginal areas for hundreds to thousands of years and may shed light into the future of around 200 million households in the face of climate change. This study investigated the efficiency of herd accumulation as a buffe...
Finding the correct variance structure. This text explores models with different variance structures in order to assess if violations of the homoscedastic assumption altered the conclusions presented in the main text.
(PDF)
Study design and the reindeer husbandry. This text provides a more detailed description of the study design as well as the reindeer husbandry in Norway.
(PDF)
Is there really a ‘collapse’ in reindeer abundance? This text investigates temporal trends in low points of reindeer abundance from 1845–2000.
(PDF)
Possible grouping effects. This text investigates possible grouping effects, e.g. differences between summer districts with respect to natural and/or social factors.
(PDF)
Reported loss. This text replicates the analysis pertaining to loss presented in the main text but where ‘reported loss’ is used as a response.
(PDF)
It has been argued that decisions in relation to choosing strategies to a large degree depend on an organism's state. For nomadic pastoralists, wealth is an important state variable since it has been argued that differences in observed behaviours reflect alternative strategies dependent on varying socioeconomic circumstances. From a game theoretica...
ABSTRACT A review of the literature concerning nomadic pastoralism reveals a prevalent assumption of a positive effect of labor inputs on pastoral production. However, studies that have tried to quantify the relationship between household labor availability and production are characterized by contradictory results where one reason may be related to...
This chapter presents a preliminary discussion of potential impacts of climate change on nomadic pastoralists on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP). Both climate model projections and observations suggest that (1) the QTP is becoming warmer and (2) precipitation is increasing. Evidence also suggests that (3) glaciers on the QTP are declining and (4)...
Previously it has been found that an important risk buffering strategy in the Saami reindeer husbandry in Norway is the accumulation of large herds of reindeer as this increases long-term household viability. Nevertheless, few studies have investigated how official policies, such as economic compensation for livestock losses, can influence pastoral...
In 1993 the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) of China established the 300 000 km2 Chang Tang Nature Preserve on the northwestern Tibetan plateau, an action precipitated by rapidly diminishing populations of chiru (Tibetan antelope) and wild yak. Some 30 000 nomadic pastoralists use areas within this reserve for livestock grazing, with many having trad...
While there is a general agreement that labour has a significant effect on agricultural production, questions have been raised as to whether this is the case for pastoral production. While a review of the literature reveals a prevalent assumption of a positive effect of labour inputs, studies quantifying the relationship have found contradictory ev...
While there is a general assumption that labour has a positive effect on pastoral production, studies that have quantified this relationship have been characterized by ambiguous results. This is most likely related to the fact that possible cooperative pastoral production has been little explored in the literature, although it is well documented th...
This study tests the hypothesis that herd accumulation can be a risk reducing strategy aimed at increasing security in an unpredictable environment. Saami reindeer husbandry in Norway is characterized
by environmental unpredictability and occasionally harsh winters can have dramatic negative effects on reindeer population
densities. While herd accu...
An important problem facing nomadic pastoralist in stochastic environments is the ability to manage production risk so as to maximise long term survival in the ‘pastoral game’. Herd maximization is one widely discussed risk reducing strategy, as herd size may act as buffer against falling below a threshold of long-term survival during occasional en...
While there is a general assumption that labor has a positive effect on pastoral production, studies that have tried to quantify this relationship have found no effects. This is most likely because these studies have been looking for effects only at the
household level of social organization, although it is well documented that nomadic pastoralist...
Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus) husbandry is believed to be the cornerstone of the Saami culture in northern Fennoscandia. The proposed project will focus on variations in time allocation among Saami reindeer herders in West Finnmark, Norway. This p roject will explore how herders deal with decision trade-offs in connection to time use. These...
Nomadic pastoralists live at the northern extent of human habitation within the ca. 5000 m elevation Aru basin, in the nortwestern part of the Chang Tang Nature Preserve, Tibet. These nomads herd primarily sheep and goats, a lesser number of yaks, and a few horses. Goats are increasing in importance because of the value of cashmere wool in national...
