Boosting and nudging people to make smart back-country decisions: The case of Norway

Abstract

Each year, alongside Norwegians, a concerning number of visiting backcountry ski-tourists lose their lives to avalanches in Norway. How do you support people to make smart decisions in a highrisk environment where regulations are few and people are left more or less to their own devices in choosing how to manage their winter mountain activity? Norway’s ethos of friluftsliv in a country with a well-established freedom to roam law, creates a thought-provoking context for studying this. How can we aid back-country winter recreationists in this quite free and competence-based context where it is expected people will make sound decisions on their own for an activity that is both fun and safe – for themselves and others. Boosting (through timely education and training) and nudging (through wellplaced decision-making aids) are two complementary strategies that could be ideal for supporting skiers in this kind of context. We’ll present the basic ideas of boosting and nudging, introduce current tools and practices used in Norway today that serve boosting and nudging functions (for example, The Mountain Code taught in schools, forecasting apps, department of transportation initiatives and a newly developed Norwegian planning and touring app). We’ll share their current strengths and weaknesses in relation to how well they might ensure safe and gratifying skiing. We’ll also consider this in light of their relevance for people who have learned to ski on Norway’s terms, but also for the thousands of visitors who each year come to Norway’s mountains from elsewhere, where the expectations, regulations and social contracts around back-country winter mountain activity may be notably different.