Managing and regulating aquaculture is a complicated issue. From the perspective of fish farmers as well as regulators managing aquaculture can be regarded as what political scientists refer to as a "wicked problem." This is because there is a great extent of uncertainty and lack of firm knowledge with respect to the externalities of aquaculture production; e.g., diseases, environmental impacts, and conflicts with other user interests. Furthermore, the dynamic nature of the aquaculture sector contributes to the uncertainty as new solutions emerge, rendering established knowledge obsolete or irrelevant. Designing appropriate public regulations and policy measures is thus important, but difficult. Based on empirical data from Norway, we investigate what respondents from public agencies and the industry perceive to be challenges in governing aquaculture and what we may infer on the characteristics of a good governance approach. We propose that such an approach needs to focus on building competence, collaboration, and be adaptable. Furthermore, it needs to be flexible and cost efficient.

In this paper we explore the proposal that knowledge generated by safety scientists may displace or marginalize existing local or system-specific safety knowledge embedded in operational practices. The proposition is based on theory about relationships between knowledge and power, complemented by organizational theory on standardization and accountability. We suggest that the increased reliance on self-regulation and international standards in safety management may be drivers for a shift in the distribution of power regarding safety, changing the conception of what is valid and useful knowledge. Case studies from two Norwegian transport sectors, the railway and the maritime sectors, are used to illustrate the proposition. In both sectors we observe discourses based on generic approaches to safety management and an accompanying disempowerment of the practitioners and their perspectives. We discuss some contributing elements to this development: for example, the roles of external and internal HSE-specialists and the increased importance of international standards. We propose that the search for broad generalizations and the widespread adoption of cybernetic thinking in safety science may resonate with societal trends towards standardization and bureaucratic control. We conclude that safety scientists, safety professionals, and organizations that hire safety professionals need to be sensitive to the possibility that their well-intentioned efforts to promote safety may lead to a marginalization of local and system-specific safety knowledge.

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New public management has led to major institutional changes in the sectors operating critical infrastructures. The previously integrated utility companies have been dismantled and are now run, regulated and organized more like private entities. This paper proposes two concepts that may aid the analysis of these organizational changes and the consequences they may have on societal safety. Commoditization refers to the process where work is sought transformed into atomistic standardized products to be ordered on a market. Modularization refers to the creation of discrete entities coordinated by market mechanisms and standardized interfaces. We argue that commoditization of work and modularization of organizational entities pose challenges to some of the informal characteristics of high-reliability organization's, with recognized importance especially for crisis management. This is illustrated by examples from Norwegian electricity network operators.

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