Climate change in Norway: Destabilized social imaginaries of welfare, growth, and nature in a rich oil state

We explore ambiguities and conflicts attached to climate change, taking a narrative approach to analyse varying representations within a media article on oil drilling in new and ecologically fragile areas on the seabeds outside Northern Norway. We explore how two narrators actively negotiate dominant Norwegian social imaginary significations of the welfare state, economic growth, and nature protection, creating narratives to negotiate changes to wider cultural, economic, and ecological agendas, to cope with the liminality of climate change. Where earlier narrative approaches to climate change have tended to focus on the whats (for example the contents, structures, or sequences of climate change narratives), our approach focuses on the hows of climate change narratives, investigating climate change as a liminal phase and tracing how social imaginaries are destabilized through narrative work.