Governing narrowed futures, climate change adaptation imaginaries in Norway

This article examines how the Norwegian white paper on climate change adaptation (CCA) articulates specific future CCA imaginaries, and how these imaginaries materialise - or fail to materialise - into practice within two network operations. As climate change impacts are increasingly present in Norway, the need for transformative actions becomes ever more urgent. We used a Critical Discourse Analysis to examine how climate change and climate change adaptation is articulated. Which specific adaptation strategies are proposed, and if CCA sits within the current paradigms. Following this, imaginaries are identified using the taxonomy from Kanarp et al. (2025). The results show that both across the policy and practice level two hegemonic imaginaries emerge including eco-modern state and knowledge society. The analysis further indicates a contradictory relation between the understanding of climate change, as bringing significant environmental change, while proposing incremental CCA practises requiring no structural change. Furthermore, longer temporal horizons are rarely considered and fail to translate into materialisation of CCA. The narrowing and stabilisation of these selected imaginaries across governance levels indicate a lack of substantive engagement with anticipated loss due to climate change and a lack of imagination to accept the plurality of diverse futures. Both are prerequisites for meaningfully foreseeing, selecting, and enacting alternative futures.