Negotiating Transitions: Power, Turbulence, and Institutional Innovation in Norway’s Energy Sector

Drawing on empirical research from the Horizon Europe E-GRUiEN project, this article explores whether Norway’s deeply institutionalised system of social dialogue offers resilience or reinforces path dependency amid the turbulence created by the twin transitions of decarbonisation and digitalisation. The Norwegian energy sector embodies both ends of the disruption spectrum, with declining fossil fuel industries on one side and expanding renewable energy on the other. Key challenges in this sector include the mismatch between legacy collective bargaining structures and new labour forms, shifting representational demands from traditional unions to emerging worker groups, and the increasing politicisation of green transition agendas. Although not an EU member, Norway is tightly integrated into the EU’s climate policy regime via the European Economic Area, aligning closely with initiatives such as the European Green Deal. These EU frameworks place growing demands on national-level actors to achieve ambitious decarbonisation goals while ensuring social inclusion. Theoretically, the analysis builds on concepts of turbulence (Ansell et al.), Schumpeterian disruption (Bodrožić & Adler), and just transition frameworks (Galgoczi; Kyriazi & Miro), to examine how labour market governance structures mediate structural transformation. This theoretical foundation informs a mixed-methods empirical analysis (combining quantitative panel data with qualitative interviews of social partners) to explore how Norwegian tripartite arrangements engage with EU-driven climate objectives and negotiate new forms of non-standard work in a turbulent policy context. I examine whether social dialogue institutions, particularly trade unions, foster proactive innovation (‘bouncing forward’) or entrench inertia (‘bouncing back’). I test the expectation that, while Norway’s social dialogue mechanisms provide institutional stability, their capacity to drive transformative change in line with EU and national policy ambitions remains limited. This study contributes to broader debates on the domestic anchoring of EU climate governance and offers critical insights into how institutional design and power relations shape national responses to labour market and environmental governance in turbulent times.