Climate targets as more than rhetoric: Accounting for Norway’s Zero Growth Objective

Abstract

Climate-related targets abound, but it is unclear how important they are driving actual transformations. Scholars have often taken a sceptical view of official climate discourses, including their ambitious targets, and instead turned their attention to civic, or 'real', action. In this paper we try on the opposite view. Contributing to a 'speculative political ecology', we argue that climate-related targets, even those without hard policies directly attached to them, can render climate change more governable and actionable. In a fragmented, polycentric and dispersed governance landscape, the immutability of a 'hard' number can create coherence, direction and measurability to policy action. We examine a particular target, and its associated governance instruments, which has arguably had a transformative effect on urban policy. Our empirical focus is Norway's Zero Growth Objective in urban transport policy. We follow the target from its first formulation as a soft goal around 2006 and until 2019, when it has materialized as a hard target shaping funding streams and concrete policy interventions, and most likely, emission levels. Arguable, it has been a highly effective frame for triggering policy action.