Norway exemplifies a number of paradoxes in relation to the just transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy provision. We investigate these paradoxes by focusing on key controversies from the oil and gas sector and onshore wind power. Despite the widespread interest in avoiding conflict and increasing public acceptance, this article sees controversies as useful sites for uncovering justice issues in possible transition pathways. The controversies reveal competing interpretations of just transition amidst an inadequate cross-cutting policy response. Conventional solutions for restructuring petro-maritime industries involve taking controversies out of sight from the public and internalizing the issue of just transition to the sector’s needs. This achieves only shallow engagement with broader society regarding the scope of societal transition needed to meet climate policies. Controversies around onshore wind installations are on the doorsteps of communities themselves and call attention to the difficult social aspects of transition that require a much broader public debate and policy response. We conclude that just transition should not be interpreted sectorally in competing energy futures but rather should infiltrate both the fossil and renewables sides of the Norwegian energy provision paradox.

Sufficiency has gained increased attention within sustainable consumption research in recent years. Often presented in opposition to guiding principles like efficiency, which discuss sustainability issues alongside ideas of economic growth, sufficiency offers alternative sustainability pathways that highlight the need to reduce consumption. This paper discusses the interrelation between sufficiency principles and consumption patterns of low-income groups, exploring how sufficiency could support the needs of vulnerable groups in society. Low-income groups use fewer material resources than high-income groups due to their comparatively limited economic resources. However, low-income groups at risk of relative poverty are also vulnerable to various factors that can significantly impact their health and wellbeing. Studying low-income groups offers possibilities for understanding the work that goes into establishing sufficiency-oriented practices and the potential pitfalls of the sufficiency discourse. Through our qualitative study of low-income groups in Norway based on focus groups and interviews, we identify three different characteristics relating to sufficiency. First, sufficiency as a necessity, pointing to situations where lack of economic resources forces low-income groups to consume frugally; second, sufficiency as opposition, where low-income groups pursue sufficiency goals because they do not identify themselves with mainstream growth narratives and consumption patterns; and, third, sufficiency as reframing sustainability, where sufficiency arguments give value to low-consumption patterns positioned against technology-centred and green consumerist narratives about sustainability.

Controversy surrounds research reports that promote reduced meat consumption in Norway. By studying these controversies in the media, we ask why meat reduction is polarised seemingly between environmental and agricultural, urban and rural voices. We show how a ‘conventional’ definition of meat reduction in a self-regulating market tends to disconnect consumption habits from agricultural policies. The result is a paradox: Norwegians are urged to eat less meat, but farmers must produce more to stay afloat. In this conventional frame, meat reduction is seen by rural and farmer voices as a further exaggeration of agricultural decline, depopulation and centralisation. To unravel this controversy, we contrast this with a critical ‘post-productivist’ view of conventional agriculture and volume-centred farm subsidies since the 1950s. We show how a different, more interactive understanding of consumption as interrelated with Norwegian food policies, production and distribution emerges, highlighting a path through the controversy. By reimagining a change from subsidies for production volume to production methods, climate, health, environmental and rural issues are brought into conversation with each other. While largely remaining a marginal voice in a heavily polarised debate, we show how alternative notions of meat reduction can help us move past meat reduction controversies. The article stresses that the two concepts of meat reduction are characterised by distinct notions of consumption, suggesting that the popular understanding of what consumption is can be a barrier to, or a part of, a meat-reduced future.