Framing sustainability in recreational hunting

Recreational hunting evokes emotions and could be described as a contested space. The paper presents a study of recreational hunting in Sweden, focusing on accounts and narratives from ethnographic interviews with hunting tourism operators. It discusses how the notion of sustainability permeates and frames moral accounts of hunting practices, game meat, wildlife management, business ethics, animal welfare and human well-being.

Through the analytical lens of ‘moral gatekeeper’, the hunting tourism operators are depicted as acting from a social position where they navigate in a space of tensions. By focusing on accounts, we focus on the mode in which the social reality is explained, narrated and justified. In this mode, we can discern different voices or counternarratives in the operators’ accounts as they relate to various positions (sometimes conflicting) and opinions of other stakeholders within the hunting community as well as in the general public.

The analysis demonstrates how the operators balance different norms and practices of recreational hunting, wildlife management, and how they talk about ‘good business’. It shows how the notion of sustainability is used in an amorphous way, as an undercurrent or explicitly articulated. For instance, it is discernible in accounts of the culture of ‘Allmogejakt’ as a traditional, democratic form of hunting and how it relates to commercial hunting; in the valuation and critical negotiation of different forms of hunting styles and practices related to the game meat; in ideals and norms of hunting business ethics, and in accounts of human well-being and the role of nature.