Håvard Haarstad
Biographic Data
| ID | 809288 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Håvard Haarstad |
| GIVEN NAMES | Håvard |
| FAMILY NAME | Haarstad |
| SIGNATURE | HAARSTAD H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bergen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2791-9282 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 381 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Channelling local climate protests: Institutional logics for managing discontent in Scandinavian cities
Building local sustainability: Identifying critical transformative capacities
This article advances the conceptual understanding of transformative capacity among local sustainability actors. It constructs and empirically explores a conceptual framework that allows for a more nuanced, contextual understanding of how public, private and civic actors at the urban scale co-creatively build capacity for sustainability transformation. We start by combining emergent sections of sustainability transitions and collaborative governa…
From experiments to organizational change: Learning from urban logistics projects in Groningen and Bergen
Cities are increasingly employing experimentation to address complex sustainability challenges. Experimentation, premised on learning-by-doing, offers organizations the space to test interventions and learn from them. However, it is not clear whether and how experiments bring about organizational changes through learning. This paper seeks to scrutinize the relationship between experimentation, learning, and organizational change, and asks: To wha…
Digitally Mediated Nature: Assessing the Role of Digital Tools in Employing Nature-Based Solutions to Urban Sustainability
Climate worry, higher education, or both? Exploring the motivations behind hydrogen optimism in Norway
Public perception can be critical for the acceptance and widespread adoption of hydrogen energy technologies (HET). While previous studies indicate general support for HET, the underlying reasons for such support remain unclear. In this paper, we examine the factors underlying perceptions of hydrogen. We analysed 2194 textual responses collected in November 2022 via the Norwegian Citizen Panel (NCP), in response to an open-ended question elicitin…
Urban sustainability: A spatial justice critique
Is energy geography running out of steam
Ptak and co-authors make a strong case for the importance of energy geography. However, it is not clear from the article how energy geography will engage with novel trends and emerging socio-political crises. This leads me to question whether energy geography is actually starting to run out of steam. I argue that we should be less concerned with the sub-discipline's purported peripherality, and instead seek to renew the field with the purpose of …
Democratic limitations of urban climate governance: Proactive and reactive citizen action in four Scandinavian cities
Climate Change Is an Intangible News Topic: A Qualitative Analysis of Audience Perceptions
In this article we examine how news audiences perceive the issue of climate change, arguing that it appears intangible compared to other major news topics people routinely encounter in everyday media use. Our study contributes to existing research on climate journalism by prioritizing an audience perspective, combining scholarship on temporalities in climate journalism with environmental social science perspectives on climate as a difficult issue…
Trust in scientists and their role in society across 68 countries
Science is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in scientists can help decision makers act on the basis of the best available evidence, especially during crises. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public trust in scientists. We interrogated these concerns with a preregistered 68-country survey of 71,922 respondents and found that in most countries, most p…
The strategic value of contradictions: Exploring the practices of climate planning in Bergen, Norway
Understanding how cities develop climate plans is crucial to capture their potential to achieve ambitious climate goals. Previous literature has highlighted the role of external pressures or heroic actors in driving local changes. By highlighting the everyday practices of actors in urban climate planning, we reveal new sets of contradictions in climate governance. Drawing from social practice theory, this paper examines how contradictions were ma…
Naturens møte med økonomien
Do cities have tools to meet their climate targets? The limits of soft governance in climate action plans
While cities have been widely considered to be key sites of ambitious and transformative climate action, it is time to question whether they have adequate tools and mandates to reach their goals in time. In this paper we provide a comprehensive assessment of planned measures in major cities, assessing the distribution of persuasive (soft) versus direct regulatory (hard) and material measures using an urban systems perspective. Examining 1079 clim…
Freight logistics and the city
In this paper we argue that urban studies should consider freight logistics as an integral part of ongoing urban transformations. The movement of goods is increasingly shaping cities, and the implications for sustainability, liveability and justice are uncertain. Still, freight logistics has been largely overlooked in urban studies. This paper seeks to remedy this. First, we review current literature on freight logistics in cities, and find that …
Watt sense of community? A human geography agenda on energy communities
Energy communities can potentially advance just transitions towards low-carbon systems by devolving energy production and consumption to local scales. During vibrant debates on evolving energy geographies for more than a decade, human geographers have engaged with conceptualization and emergent models of energy communities in generative ways. We argue for a research agenda where these understandings of space, place and scale enhance research on e…
Power in urban logistics: A comparative analysis of networks and policymaking in logistics sustainability governance
This article unpacks the power relations in urban logistics to understand why cities follow different policy pathways to sustainability. Drawing on the literature on power in sustainability transitions, we investigate key actors' framings of sustainability in urban logistics and assess how they leverage their positions to pursue their framing of sustainability. We utilize a mixed-method approach, with a quantitative social network analysis and se…
Social implications of energy infrastructure digitalisation and decarbonisation
Digitalisation provides opportunities to decarbonise energy and, simultaneously, address social exclusion and inequality—but it is unclear whether and how these opportunities are realised. Three case studies investigate whether ongoing energy infrastructure digitalisation processes are accommodating commoning or enclosure, using a continuum of commoning versus enclosure practices to examine this question. Multi-sited fieldwork throughout the peri…
Grounding the compact city
In our article, ‘Diversifying the compact city’ (2023), we aimed to open a dialogue in human geography and beyond on how to broaden the scope of how we examine and critique compact urbanism. The insightful and constructive commentaries we received generated further reflection on the lived experiences of compact urbanism and the mutual benefits of constructive interdisciplinary collaboration on the compact city agenda. In this author response, we …
Diffusion of global climate policy: National depoliticization, local repoliticization in Turkey
Although climate policy diffusion is widely studied, we know comparatively little about how these global policies and the norms that surround them are used by various political actors seeking to advance their own agendas. In this article, we focus on how global climate norms are diffused differently at national and local scales and used to repoliticize or depoliticize climate change. We focus on the case of Turkey, which carries the stark contras…
Do EU goals matter? Assessing the localization of sustainable urban logistics governance goals in Norwegian cities
Sustainable urban logistics is imperative to meet urban sustainability goals. In the European context, the European Union (EU) set an ambitious target in 2011 of essentially CO2-free urban logistics by 2030. However, it is unclear how effectively such EU targets for urban logistics have shaped national- and urban-level policymaking. This paper investigates whether there is evidence of localization of these supranational goals for urban logistics …
Populist far right discursive-institutional tactics in European regional decarbonization
What rhetorical strategies are populist far-right parties using to delay regional decarbonization? This paper focuses on three populist far-right parties—the Conservative People's Party of Estonia (EKRE), Alternative for Germany (AfD), and Poland's Law and Justice (PiS)—and the discursive-institutional tactics each used from 2014 to 2021 to delay decarbonization of their carbon-intensive regions. We identify three discursive-institutional tactics…
Climate targets as more than rhetoric: Accounting for Norway's Zero Growth Objective
Climate-related targets for cities abound, but it is unclear how important they are in driving actual transformations. Scholars have often taken a skeptical view of official climate discourses, including their ambitious targets, and instead turned their attention to experimentation, innovation and civic action - colloquially termed 'real action.' In this article we try on the opposite view. Contributing to 'speculative political ecology', we argu…
The justice pitfalls of a sustainable transport transition
This article examines the potential adverse effects of sustainable transport transitions on justice. It is important for policy debates to consider how pro-environment policies may adversely impact social justice. We apply a broad conception of justice as comprising redistribution, representation and recognition to the transport transition in Bergen, Norway, with ambitious climate mitigation policies to be met primarily by reshaping transport. Th…
Displacing Conflicting Goals in Planning for Sustainability? Insights from Three Norwegian Cities
Sustainable transformation is hampered by conflicting goals. Here we examine how goal conflicts are handled in planning practice, focusing on processes around municipal climate and sustainability governance. We investigate local manifestations of goal conflicts between transport and land use planning and emissions reductions in three Norwegian cities, using document analysis, interviews and observation. We find that governance actors handle goal …
Competing climate spectacles in the amplified public space
The climate change debate is finding new expressions through political protests and demonstrations, during which a plurality of climate narratives emerges. While protests such as Extinction Rebellion have had a strong physical manifestation, involving many people showing up in concrete locations, they have also been facilitated and mediated virtually. In this paper, we examine the spectacle generated when divergent discourses on climate change co…
Carbonscapes and beyond: Conceptualizing the instability of oil landscapes
Geographers tend to see energy systems as intricately interwoven with society and relatively resistant to change. We argue that there is a danger of exaggerating the permanence and stability of the energy–society relationship. Therefore we propose a framework that is more open to instability and transformation. Using assemblage theory, we frame the social and material landscapes of oil – carbonscapes – as having emergent capacities for change bui…
Rescaling low‐carbon transformations: Towards a relational ontology
Scale is an emergent theme in current scientific and policy debates on low-carbon urban transformations. Yet notions of scale employed in such contexts are typically based on linear and hierarchical ontologies, and miss out on the long-standing development of more nuanced conceptions of scale within Human Geography. This paper aims to advance a relational understanding of scale in the analysis and evaluation of low-carbon urban initiatives (LCUIs…
Globalization and the power of rescaled narratives: A case of opposition to mining in Tambogrande, Peru
Populism, Instability, and Rupture in Sustainability Transformations
The recent surge in populist politics in Europe and North America has challenged many of the policies aimed at advancing sustainable shifts. In this article we argue that this surge necessitates a rethinking of transition and transformation. The mainstream perspective on transitions understands it largely as the proliferation and upscaling of innovative technologies and policy frameworks. We recast sustainability transitions and transformations a…
Diversifying the compact city: A renewed agenda for geographical research
The compact city has become part of the policy orthodoxy in dealing with climate change and other sustainability challenges, and scholars from a diverse set of disciplines have informed this policy through empirical research. In this paper, we argue that attuning research in this field to key perspectives and concepts in human geography and critical urban studies can help ‘diversify’ understandings of compact urbanism in ways that advance social …
Who benefits from sustainable mobility transitions? Social inclusion, populist resistance and elite capture in Bergen, Norway
Transitioning to sustainable mobility systems is generally thought to require three approaches: avoid, shift and improve. We examine a combination of these in a city at the forefront of implementing transition policies, focusing on how the approaches interact and impact social inclusion. The Norwegian city of Bergen has pursued ambitious targets to reduce car use and promote walking, cycling and public transportation (avoid and shift). National s…
Digitalization as a driver of transformative environmental innovation
This viewpoint argues for an explicit focus on digitalization as a key driver of transformative environmental change and innovation in the next decade. We hold that digitalization is more than a landscape concern. Our piece suggests three elements of a critical approach to digitalization: to examine its ubiquitous unfolding, to study it as a real socio-material phenomenon 'on the ground', and to analyse how it enables new forms of coordination ac…
The smart city as mobile policy: Insights on contemporary urbanism
Collective political subjectivity and the problem of scale
The contemporary political climate presents significant challenges for attempts to conceptualize and practise collective action. New forms of socio-spatial organization have challenged the centrali
The politics of rapid urban transformation
Where are urban energy transitions governed? Conceptualizing the complex governance arrangements for low-carbon mobility in Europe
This article addresses the question of where urban low-carbon energy transitions are governed. A challenge is that urban governance is not simply urban, but a complex assemblage of institutions, networks and socio-technical arrangements. There are several on-going literature debates discussing the different types of processes in which cities are involved. I disaggregate these into vertical processes (multilevel governance perspectives), horizonta…
Labor agency and the importance of the national scale: Emergent aquaculture unionism in Chile
Transformation as relational mobilisation: The networked geography of Addis Ababa's sustainable transport interventions
Literatures on sustainability transition and transformation increasingly emphasise the role of spatiality and local agency. This paper argues that relational thinking has much more to offer this debate than presently acknowledged, particularly in revealing the geographical interconnections between dispersed nodes of action and innovation. We use relationality to show the interconnections at work in exchanging and negotiating sustainability interv…
Populist far right discursive-institutional tactics in European regional decarbonization
What rhetorical strategies are populist far-right parties using to delay regional decarbonization? This paper focuses on three populist far-right parties—the Conservative People's Party of Estonia (EKRE), Alternative for Germany (AfD), and Poland's Law and Justice (PiS)—and the discursive-institutional tactics each used from 2014 to 2021 to delay decarbonization of their carbon-intensive regions. We identify three discursive-institutional tactics…
Trust in scientists and their role in society across 68 countries
Science is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in scientists can help decision makers act on the basis of the best available evidence, especially during crises. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public trust in scientists. We interrogated these concerns with a preregistered 68-country survey of 71,922 respondents and found that in most countries, most p…
Backlash Reconsidered: Neoliberalism and Popular Mobilization in Bolivia
This article argues that the common narrative of a Bolivian backlash against neoliberalism should be reconsidered in light of the continuities and mutual constraints between popular mobilization and neoliberal policy reforms. The study draws on literature that conceptualizes neoliberalism as a particular construction of state and social forms; but unlike those works, it includes an analysis of International Monetary Fund policy shifts to understa…
FDI policy and political spaces for labour: The disarticulation of the Bolivian petroleros
Decision-making and scalar biases in solar photovoltaics roll-out
Rapid roll-out of solar photovoltaic (PV) energy is a key component of decarbonising energy systems. Yet clear risks are involved, including footprints from land use and infrastructure as well as socio-economic inequalities. Where are the critical decisions about solar roll-out made, by whom, and to what effect for justice? The paper reviews and synthesises emerging scholarship on solar PV roll-out, cross-sectoral aspects of this multi-scalar ene…
E-scooter regulation: The micro-politics of market-making for micro-mobility in Bergen
Micro-mobility market-making represents an under-studied but important aspect of urban transport sustainability transitions. Micro-mobility roll-out combines several critical elements: decarbonisation, digitalisation and public space interventions. We theorise the emergence of a micro-mobility market, drawing on innovation studies, micro-politics scholarship and commoning mobility literature, and critically discuss the relationship between innova…
Historicizing Urban Sustainability: The Shifting Ideals Behind Forus Industrial Park, Norway
Urban sustainability interventions must always contend with the built environment––the historically accumulated materialization of previous rounds of city building. In this article we argue for a historicized perspective on urban sustainability that allows us to consider how ideals of the past, materialized in the urban built environment, constrain current sustainability interventions. Drawing on the policy mobility literature, science and techno…
Watt sense of community? A human geography agenda on energy communities
Energy communities can potentially advance just transitions towards low-carbon systems by devolving energy production and consumption to local scales. During vibrant debates on evolving energy geographies for more than a decade, human geographers have engaged with conceptualization and emergent models of energy communities in generative ways. We argue for a research agenda where these understandings of space, place and scale enhance research on e…
Transformative social science? Modes of engagement in climate and energy solutions
Globalization and the New Spaces for Social Movement Politics: The Marginalization of Labor Unions in Bolivian Gas Nationalization
This article aims for a critical engagement with the new spaces for social movement politics. Recent literature focusing on the relationship between globalization and these spaces foregrounds the new opportunity structures for political practices. Yet amid talk of ‘grassroots globalization’ and ‘globalization from below’, it is important to remain sensitive to how certain forms of practice and organization, particularly those of labor unions, are…
Power in urban logistics: A comparative analysis of networks and policymaking in logistics sustainability governance
This article unpacks the power relations in urban logistics to understand why cities follow different policy pathways to sustainability. Drawing on the literature on power in sustainability transitions, we investigate key actors' framings of sustainability in urban logistics and assess how they leverage their positions to pursue their framing of sustainability. We utilize a mixed-method approach, with a quantitative social network analysis and se…
Diffusion of global climate policy: National depoliticization, local repoliticization in Turkey
Although climate policy diffusion is widely studied, we know comparatively little about how these global policies and the norms that surround them are used by various political actors seeking to advance their own agendas. In this article, we focus on how global climate norms are diffused differently at national and local scales and used to repoliticize or depoliticize climate change. We focus on the case of Turkey, which carries the stark contras…
Collective political subjectivity and the problem of scale
The contemporary political climate presents significant challenges for attempts to conceptualize and practise collective action. New forms of socio-spatial organization have challenged the centrali
Globalization and the power of rescaled narratives: A case of opposition to mining in Tambogrande, Peru
The New Left in South America
This book review of Nikolas Kozloff's recent book ‘Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left’ questions whether the political developments in the region can or should be characterized as a revolution. Kozloff provides a timely and insightful overview over these developments, on the basis of interviews and his long time engagement with the region. But he struggles to confirm his main thesis (Revolution!). The book would have benefited…
FDI policy and political spaces for labour: The disarticulation of the Bolivian petroleros
Globalization and the New Spaces for Social Movement Politics: The Marginalization of Labor Unions in Bolivian Gas Nationalization
This article aims for a critical engagement with the new spaces for social movement politics. Recent literature focusing on the relationship between globalization and these spaces foregrounds the new opportunity structures for political practices. Yet amid talk of ‘grassroots globalization’ and ‘globalization from below’, it is important to remain sensitive to how certain forms of practice and organization, particularly those of labor unions, are…
Class, Community and Communicative Planning: Urban Redevelopment at King's Cross, London
This paper presents an argument for considering issues of class in analyses of communicative planning projects. In these projects, class interests tend to be obscured by the contemporary preoccupation with the class‐ambiguous category of “community”. Through a case study of a project of urban redevelopment at King's Cross in London, we conceptualize and map class interests in an urban redevelopment project. Three aspects of the planning process t…
Backlash Reconsidered: Neoliberalism and Popular Mobilization in Bolivia
This article argues that the common narrative of a Bolivian backlash against neoliberalism should be reconsidered in light of the continuities and mutual constraints between popular mobilization and neoliberal policy reforms. The study draws on literature that conceptualizes neoliberalism as a particular construction of state and social forms; but unlike those works, it includes an analysis of International Monetary Fund policy shifts to understa…
Latin American middle classes and political mobilization for universal welfare
Social policy and global poverty: Beyond the residual paradigm
New Political Spaces in Latin American Natural Resource Governance
Conclusion
The case studies tell stories of powerlessness and incapacity, of how movements and collective action run up against stronger forces, internal fragmentation and failures of coordination. The ability to network (i.e. horizontal relations with other social actors) across social sectors is a major success factor for social movements but we do not know enough about who are participating in social movement networks, or whether there are significant gr…
Social Movements, the Poor and the New Politics of the Americas
This essay, reflecting on the articles in this special issue and the conference where they were originally presented, points to the political transformations that have occurred in Latin America in the last 20 years, particularly in relation to poverty. The emerging new politics is not simply a reaction to neoliberal policies but stems from long-term historical trajectories of marginalization and struggle. Changes in the political landscape includ…
Labor agency and the importance of the national scale: Emergent aquaculture unionism in Chile
Social Movements, the Poor and the New Politics of the Americas
Cross-scalar Dynamics of the Resource Curse: Constraints on Local Participation in the Bolivian Gas Sector
Contributing to debate on the contextual underpinnings and varieties of the resource curse, this article points to how political and economic dynamics of resource endowments operate in interrelated but potentially contradictory ways across spatial scales. Resource endowments insert a complex set of incentives and interests into the political arena in ways that both enable and constrain actors at different scales. Using a case study of gas governa…
Climate Change, Environmental Governance and the Scale Problem
As the world faces critical challenges in resource and energy sustainability, the importance of transforming the way governance institutions work across scales is increasingly recognized by policy makers, policy advocates and scientists. The scale problem has become a central topic of discussion in different disciplines, but it is one to which the discipline of geography has a particularly important contribution to make. This article argues for g…
Carbonscapes and beyond: Conceptualizing the instability of oil landscapes
Geographers tend to see energy systems as intricately interwoven with society and relatively resistant to change. We argue that there is a danger of exaggerating the permanence and stability of the energy–society relationship. Therefore we propose a framework that is more open to instability and transformation. Using assemblage theory, we frame the social and material landscapes of oil – carbonscapes – as having emergent capacities for change bui…
Where are urban energy transitions governed? Conceptualizing the complex governance arrangements for low-carbon mobility in Europe
This article addresses the question of where urban low-carbon energy transitions are governed. A challenge is that urban governance is not simply urban, but a complex assemblage of institutions, networks and socio-technical arrangements. There are several on-going literature debates discussing the different types of processes in which cities are involved. I disaggregate these into vertical processes (multilevel governance perspectives), horizonta…
The politics of rapid urban transformation
Historicizing Urban Sustainability: The Shifting Ideals Behind Forus Industrial Park, Norway
Urban sustainability interventions must always contend with the built environment––the historically accumulated materialization of previous rounds of city building. In this article we argue for a historicized perspective on urban sustainability that allows us to consider how ideals of the past, materialized in the urban built environment, constrain current sustainability interventions. Drawing on the policy mobility literature, science and techno…
Bridging socio-technical and justice aspects of sustainable energy transitions
Transformative social science? Modes of engagement in climate and energy solutions
Rescaling low‐carbon transformations: Towards a relational ontology
Scale is an emergent theme in current scientific and policy debates on low-carbon urban transformations. Yet notions of scale employed in such contexts are typically based on linear and hierarchical ontologies, and miss out on the long-standing development of more nuanced conceptions of scale within Human Geography. This paper aims to advance a relational understanding of scale in the analysis and evaluation of low-carbon urban initiatives (LCUIs…
The smart city as mobile policy: Insights on contemporary urbanism
Urban Planning and the Smart City: Projects, Practices and Politics
Today’s smart city agendas are the latest iteration of urban sociotechnical innovation. Their aim is to use information and communication technologies (ICT) to improve the economic and environmental performance of cities while hopefully providing a better quality of life for residents. Urban planners have a long-standing tradition of aligning technological innovation with the built environment and residents but have been only peripherally engaged…
Political science (50 works) · Sociology (38 works) · Politics (33 works) · Economics (25 works) · Geography (22 works) · Law (22 works) · Sustainability and Climate Change Governance (19 works) · Engineering (18 works) · Business (17 works) · Political economy (17 works)