Presentation short abstract

Norway justifies hydropower, oil, and new green extraction as future‐oriented necessity, marginalising alternative temporalities. This paper argues this reflects an integral logic to the "Nordic model of dispossession", in which redistributive welfare policies obscures extractive dependence.

Presentation long abstract

Nordic welfare capitalism is often presented as evidence that social protection and environmental responsibility can coexist within capitalist modernity. Yet the Norwegian case reveals how prosperity and welfare expansion have been underwritten by long-standing forms of extractive temporal externalisation—from the historical damming of Sámi rivers for hydropower to decades of offshore oil extraction, and now the forward-projecting promises of wind power and seabed mining framed as green necessity. These interventions are legitimated through narratives of urgency and intergenerational responsibility, framing extraction as a necessary sacrifice to secure the welfare state’s future. Such narratives collide with the seasonal and ancestral temporalities that shape Sámi land use and stewardship, casting Indigenous temporal frameworks as obstacles to progress or as temporally “out of sync” with national development.

This paper theorises this contradictory logic as integral to the "Nordic model of dispossession" — a configuration in which egalitarian welfare institutions are materially sustained by extractive relations that are obscured through ideological narratives of national progress, shared benefit, and responsible modernity. By examining how redistributive and predistributive strategies are mobilised to stabilise extractive relations rather than transform them, the project interrogates Nordic social-democratic ideology and Nordic exceptionalist imaginaries that present reform as both sufficient and inevitable for progressive social change. Attending to temporal conflict in Norway’s green transition highlights how time functions as a site of dispossession and resistance, shaping the horizons of repair and the political imagination of transformation.