| dc.description.abstract | The social and political barriers to sustainability are often presumed to boil down to misalignments of power and motivation. If only those who have the power to initiate sustainability transitions could be motivated to do so – or conversely; those who have the motivation could be empowered to do so – then sustainability would presumably follow. This presumption is problematic. Not only because it skirts the difficulties in operationalizing and evaluating sustainability. But also because it neglects the social and political processes through which some behaviors and technologies come to be coded as ‘sustainable’ and others as ‘unsustainable’.
Over the past few decades, life cycle assessments (LCA) have come to take center-stage in these processes. The upside of this trend has been a shift in emphasis, away from face-sustain-ability1 and direct emissions; towards supply chains and displacement effects. The downsides have included all the predictable pitfalls of governance by numbers: operational definitions with poor construct validity; black boxes that are hard for non-experts to challenge; quarrels over conflicting evidence, etc.
Over the same period, an extensive literature has accrued, dealing with the validity, limitations, and appropriate use of LCA. The impacts particular LCAs have had on particular sustainability discourses and decision-making processes, by contrast, have largely been neglected as a topic of research. This thesis seeks to bridge this hole in the extant literature, by examining the impacts LCA has had on Norwegian sustainability discourse and policy-making; by synthesizing insights from social constructivism (i.e. how taken-for-granted realities congeal through social practices), science and technology studies (e.g. black-boxing, epistemic authority, and boundary work), and the ethics and sociology of quantifications (e.g. mathiness, metric fixation, and data inertia).
The thesis begins by assessing the validity of LCA through a critical appraisal of the extant literature on climate metrics and life cycle assessments. It then goes on to describe the role of LCA in sustainability discourses through two case studies: the 2021 debate about a managed decline of petroleum production; and the 2007 - 2019 debate about a managed transition from plastic to paper bags. Finally, it addresses the role of LCA in policymaking through a combination of document analysis and unstructured interviews with representatives of local authorities in the Norwegian county of Rogaland.
This examination provides a basis for arguing that: (1) the boundaries between ‘sustainable’ and ‘unsustainable’ activities cannot in general be drawn objectively – but they nonetheless have to be drawn somehow; (2) LCA can serve this purpose and may facilitate rational decision making; (3) but tends – as a general rule – to be short on validity and susceptible to reification, co-option, and technocratic decision making. | |
