| dc.description.abstract | The Norwegian salmon farming industry currently finds itself in a state of radical technological
development. Many industry actors have recently undertaken large-scale projects to test the
structural and economic feasibility of new operational technologies as a means of replacing the
industry’s primary production infrastructure. This phenomenon has largely been spurred by the
government’s institution in 2017 of a developmental licensing scheme intended to promote
these initiatives. In this paper, we seek to discover the roles that these alternative production
technologies play in the industry’s development. We accomplish this through the usage of two
complementary qualitative methods: the application of Grounded Theory to transcripts of
interviews conducted with decision-makers in the industry (n = 7), and the employment of topic
modeling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation to industry news articles (n = 1,011). Our findings
indicate that the industry is limited in its production volume outputs, largely as a result of
legislation implemented by the government aimed to curb negative production externalities.
Additionally, we find that the domestic industry faces an uncertain future with regards to its
profitability. This financial metric is expected to be negatively influenced by entrant countries
to the global industry. New countries have the potential to become competitive global suppliers
upon the construction and operation of local land-based RAS salmon farms to produce salmon
of harvest size, constituting a threat to Norway’s salmon farmers. In contrast, the usage of landbased RAS salmon farming to produce post-smolts was found to play a supportive role in the
domestic industry due to its compatibility with current infrastructure and operational processes.
Other alternative production technologies, such as semi-closed containment systems and
offshore salmon farming facilities were not determined to play a large or immediate role in the
industry’s development. Furthermore, our findings suggested that the Norwegian salmon
farming industry prefers to utilize and adapt existing processes, rather than to replace them
entirely. | en_US |
