A Sami land-claims settlement? Assessing Norway's Finnmark Act in a comparative perspective

Abstract

The Sami, the Indigenous peoples of Fennoscandia, assert ownership-, use-, and management-rights to their traditional lands. Norway's 2005 Finnmark Act is the only legislation so far to broadly respond to those assertions. How to interpret the act has long been contested, and is now the subject of a legal case before Norway's Supreme Court. Despite parallels between the land-rights assertions of Sami and those of Indigenous peoples elsewhere, and despite abundant legislation responding to Indigenous land-rights assertions elsewhere, the Finnmark Act has seldom been analyzed comparatively. In this article, we study the act against the backdrop of Indigenous land-claims settlements in Canada—the state where such legislation is most institutionalized. We find the Finnmark Act features many of the same institutional and procedural elements as Canadian settlements. However, we also find that in Norway those elements have been legally integrated, and practically implemented, in a different and less coherent way, rendering the act dysfunctional. We conclude by drawing lessons from the Canadian example to prescribe adjustments to the understanding and ongoing implementation of the Finnmark Act, to potentially put the accommodation of Sami land-rights on a smoother path.