Norway is an active player in international climate politics, with strong consensus on the issue underpinned by cross-party Climate Settlements. Despite this, Norway has only marginally reduced its domestic greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, attempts to establish a new Climate Settlement in 2021 failed. Does this failure constitute a break with Norway’s consensual climate tradition, and is this good or bad news for climate policy? In this chapter, we investigate whether and to what extent the consensus characterizing the 2000s and 2010s contributed to climate policy development or stasis. Focusing on two key sectors – petroleum and transport – we find that key Norwegian climate policies have developed through a dynamic tension of depoliticization and repoliticization over time, with mixed effects. We identify reasons for depoliticization and repoliticization and argue that it is useful to embrace agnosticism in the debate over politicization versus policy stability, instead exploring this on an empirical and contextual basis. Moreover, we uncover a dynamic of politicization in one policy area affecting policy development in another, arguing that such spillover effects warrant analytical attention.

Chapter 8 traces the EU governance of transport services from the Treaty of Rome to the new economic governance (NEG) regime adopted by the EU after the 2008 financial crisis. Initially, European public sector advocates were able to shield transport from commodification, but, over time, the Commission gradually advanced a commodification agenda one transport modality after another. Sometimes, however, the Commission’s draft liberalisation laws encountered enduring resistance and recurrent transnational protests by transport workers, leading the European Parliament and Council to curb the commodification bent of the Commission’s draft directives. After 2008 however, NEG provided EU executives with new means to circumvent resistance. Despite their country-specific methodology, all qualitative NEG prescriptions on transport services issued to Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Romania pointed towards commodification. But the more the Commission succeeded in commodifying transport services, the more the nature of counter-mobilisations changed. Accordingly, the European Transport Workers’ Federation’s Fair Transport European Citizens’ Initiative no longer targeted vertical EU interventions, but rather the social dumping pressures created by the horizontal free movement of services and fellow transport workers. This target made joint transnational collective action more difficult.