River Management. Technological Challenge or Conceptual Illusion? Salmon Weirs and Hydroelectric Dams on the Kemi River in Northern Finland - Implementing Environmental and Resource Management - page 229

19 River Management. Technological Challenge
or Conceptual Illusion? Salmon Weirs and
Hydroelectric Dams on the Kemi River in
Northern Finland
Franz Krause
Department of Anthropology, School of Social Science, University of Aberdeen,
Scotland
19.1 Introduction
This paper takes the management of the Kemi River in the Finnish province of
Lapland as an example for asking what environmental management is or can do,
in practice and in theory. It argues that environmental management - if understood
as controlling an environmental phenomenon following a ready-made plan - is not
a suitable concept for understanding the interactions between the river and the
people on its banks. Either, environmental management has to be defined widely
as a dialogue between human and non-human actors, or it must be discarded as the
illusion of a modernist, positivist ideology that projects static categories on the
world. This paper juxtaposes the dams used for salmon fishing and those used in
hydroelectricity production on the Kemi River. It illustrates the adaptability of the
former to the river's processes and then shows how very different the technology
and rhetoric of the latter appears when it comes to relations with the river. In spite
of the significantly larger impacts that hydroelectricity production has on the river
as a whole, it will be argued that upon a closer look, the operation of the system of
power stations has much in common with that of the salmon weirs.
This paper explores to what degree a river can be managed. Observations along
the Kemi River, the principal waterway of the Finnish province of Lapland, sug-
gest that in spite of claims to the contrary, no management regime can control the
river. Instead, river management has to be understood as a reciprocal engagement
between the 'managers' and the 'object' of management. To clarify this, two types
of construction that have been built across the flow of the Kemi River over its
eventful history will be juxtaposed. Salmon fishing weirs and hydroelectric dams
were both intended to regulate and harvest a particular quality of the river - the
rising salmon on the one hand, the water's gravity on the other.
While it seems rather obvious how the construction and operation of salmon
fishing weirs reflect the reciprocal engagement of its users with the dynamics of