ABSTRACT
Today Norway enjoys the reputation of having some of the world’s strictest environmental regulations and the most far-reaching legislation protecting the rights of the country’s Sami indigenous people. Large infrastructure projects like hydro-power dams must pass through a rigorous process of review and public scrutiny before they can be approved for construction. Norway’s progressive image has been enhanced abroad by the work of the UN Commission on Environment and Development, which was headed by the former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland from 1985. In the international debate, the commission came to represent a more environmentally friendly approach, and made Brundtland and Norway synonymous with the concept of sustainable development. Less well known outside the Nordic region is the terrible political struggle over a dam on the Alta river in the extreme north of the country that lies behind, and is in an odd way responsible for, this green façade. The Alta Dam, with a generating capacity of a mere 150 megawatts, was neither needed nor financially viable. The project was opposed not only by environmentalists and the Sami communities living in the area, but also by the municipal governments,
fisher-folk, farmers, students, intellectuals, journalists-a whole spectrum of Norwegian civil society at local and national level. This widespread popular resistance to the scheme spanned more than a decade. The state responded to the opposition with the largest police operation in modern Norwegian history. For reasons that are still partly obscure, the government was determined to force this project through. As Minister for the Environment and then later as Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland firmly supported the dam and, at strategic moments, made decisions that thwarted efforts to stop it.
