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In the contested space of energy production in Canada, tension and a series of disputes over land and rights have arisen between the state, industry and local Aboriginal communities. Canadian governments have long exploited the bountiful natural resources of the land, while at the same time attempting to reconcile a difficult relationship with its Aboriginal communities. This case study reveals how the government has yielded responsibility to industry to resolve the many governance challenges of Canada's extractive hot zone. Through substantial delegation of governance duties to industry, the Canadian Government has placed large parts of its regulatory toolbox in the hands of multinational Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) departments, and hence turned social and environmental planning and programming into corporate stakeholder management. This article sets out to explain these dramatic changes in governance power play and practice by examining the case of the extractive hot zone in Alberta, according to three distinct but interlinked trajectories in governance and CSR scholarship, namely the change from "government" to "governance", the emergence of a claimed post-political condition and the evolution of CSR practices towards stakeholder management. ; publishedVersion

The recent surge in populist politics in Europe and North America has challenged many of the policies aimed at advancing sustainable shifts. In this article we argue that this surge necessitates a rethinking of transition and transformation. The mainstream perspective on transitions understands it largely as the proliferation and upscaling of innovative technologies and policy frameworks. We recast sustainability transitions and transformations as continuous processes of assembly and disassembly, driven by rupture and instability. Rather than seeing populist resurgence as a "barrier" to change toward sustainability, we argue that these ruptures and instabilities should be considered inherent to the transformation process itself. The recent local election in Bergen, Norway, witnessed the surge of a new "anti-elite" political party dedicated to protesting road tolls that finance public transport. We hold that although such movements certainly pose challenges to sustainable transitions, they also provide opportunities for revitalizing democratic politics—moving beyond postpolitical managerial governance and inviting new concerns into local and urban transformation processes. ; publishedVersion

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.