Initiatives and barriers for green transition in peripheral regions: path tracing and agentic orientations in the bioeconomy of Norway

Abstract

Environmental degradation and climate change permeate our society and have unforeseen regional impacts. The literature on green transitions highlights preexisting structures that hinder or facilitate change and, more recently, micro-level actions in creating change. However, little is known about peripheral regions struggling to overcome systemic decline and ‘left-behindness’ in this context. In this paper, we adopt the approach of path tracing following a bioeconomy initiative aiming for circularity. We create a timeline of critical junctures to demonstrate the dialectic relationship between agency and structures influencing the prevailing change. Our findings highlight that local actors in the periphery are embedded in temporal and spatial relations (top-down causation), and that these processes hinder local agency (bottom-up causation), due to critical events that resonate with international, national and regional (i.e., multi-level) macro-political and economic conditions.