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

Abstract

Climate-related targets for cities abound, but it is unclear how important they are in driving actual transformations. Scholars have often taken a skeptical view of official climate discourses, including their ambitious targets, and instead turned their attention to experimentation, innovation and civic action – colloquially termed 'real action.' In this article we try on the opposite view. Contributing to '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, by when it had materialized as a hard target shaping funding streams and concrete policy interventions, and most likely, emission levels. Arguably, it has been a highly effective frame for policy.