Public resources
In Norwegian public discourse and societal life, there exists an idea that we, as residents of this country, collectively manage a multitude of highly valuable resources. These resources originate from the Norwegian nature and are so valuable, and so closely tied to our shared history and identity, that they are often referred to as our 'silver inheritance.'
Foremost among them is hydropower. The transformation of waterfalls into electrical energy has become an integral part of the symbolism and narrative around the distinctiveness of our society. It narrates the taming and persistent cultivation by Norwegians of the country's 'furrowed and weather-beaten' topography and the prosperity increase that followed the industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The metaphor of a 'silver inheritance' precisely symbolizes collective ownership, asserting that the enduring and latent values in the Norwegian mountain wilderness belong to the entire people and not just landowners or the generation that happened to be the first to industrialize and financially exploit the resources.
But this somewhat peculiar Norwegian insistence that the management of natural resources should assume a democratic character – that it involves common ownership – has never, in the same way as reservoirs and waterfalls, been inherent in nature.
On the contrary, behind the development of the Norwegian regulatory regime for hydropower lies a long political and legal process. A process that still today has significant implications for how we, as a community, manage the values latent in the Norwegian nature.
The so-called concession laws constitute the most important legislation in this field. Through various provisions, they regulate who can utilize Norwegian forests, land, minerals, and watercourses, and under what conditions.
Nature as private property
On one side, there is consideration for private property rights. Before the concession laws, natural resources were not something most people had much influence over. In contrast to most other countries on the European continent – where riverbeds historically have been crucial transportation routes and therefore subject to strict state control – ownership of Norwegian watercourses has traditionally been regarded as the property of landowners.
Natural resources as common property
On the other hand, it is, nevertheless, in the consideration of hydropower as a common resource and as a component of the societal infrastructure that we find the central focal point for the Norwegian state's regulation of our natural resources. It is said that one should never sell the 'silver inheritance,' and this is legally affirmed in the concession laws.
The starting point for the law was a situation where Norwegian waterfalls, from the late 1800s, suddenly became attractive as investment objects for foreign capital. Unlike, for example, Sweden and Switzerland, Norway's high mountain plateaus consist of numerous lakes that, even without large dams, are well-suited as reservoirs for electricity production. And, unlike most other countries, the watercourses at that time were, as mentioned, transferable private property.
At this time, foreign companies had already gained a reputation for exploiting timber resources along the region of Helgeland and exerting significant control over trading hubs for timber and fish in the region of Lofoten. Could the same happen with hydropower resources?
The politicans took action
In the time around the liberation from the union with Sweden, an opinion spread that restrictions on foreign ownership of the country's natural resources were a matter of national independence and neutrality. In the spring of 1906, the newspaper Verdens Gang published several articles about foreign investors traveling around Norwegian villages and buying waterfall rights.
The result was a decade of intensive legislative work in the Norwegian national assembly. The Parliament eventually passed a series of laws related to the acquisition of natural resources, their taxation, and most controversial of all; the so-called 'reversion,' meaning that hydropower plants 'revert' to state ownership at the expiration of the concession.
In 1917, we were left with what is still referred to as the concession laws. The basic idea is that those who apply to the government for permission – that is, concession – to exploit the resources of Norwegian nature, undertake a set of obligations. Firstly, they must return parts of the, sometimes, enormous values they acquire to the community through taxes and fees. But equally important, they must also accept that nature fundamentally belonged to the collective and political – and not solely the private law – sphere.
In other words, the community through our state authorities has the final say in regulatory matters. This applies regardless of the specific objectives of public control, ranging from ensuring the community's share of profits in power companies, imposing restrictions on the power of foreign companies in Norway, to securing welfare and industrial policy objectives similar to those that dominated Norwegian politics in the post-war period.
From hydropower to oil
'Power communalism,' a term introduced by historian Lars Thue (Thue, 1996), has meant that the benefits from hydropower production are far more evenly distributed than if the resources had remained tradable private property. Through the national management systems regulating a range of other natural resources, the principles have been continued. Including the linchpin in the explosive growth of prosperity in recent decades; the petroleum sector.
Just as Norwegian politicians at the beginning of the 20th century suddenly discovered that the country possessed enormous economic values that no one had previously benefited from, the same was the case 60 years later when oil suddenly became something that could be pumped directly from the rocks at the bottom of the North Sea.
The Norwegian bureaucracy pulled out the old concession laws for hydropower 'almost instinctively' (Ryggvik, 2009) when negotiating the concession regime for petroleum. And even then, the idea was that resources at the bottom of the continental shelf, like waterfalls and water reservoirs, are a gift from nature and not a product of human labor.
We therefore needed - and still need - a legal framework that regulates access to Norway's resource rent Whether it is hydropower plants, agricultural properties, valuable minerals, oil, or the wind power that is rising to become a future 'silver,' nature's gifts must not only be refined but also distributed.
They are, as Justice Minister Johan Castberg pointed out in 1909, 'national treasures of such great general and societal importance' that it is the responsibility of the state to ensure that they are managed 'in the most beneficial way for the common good.'
The concession laws remain the foundation that ensures this.