Yamina Saheb
Author
In the summer of 2025, Norway, which is among the world's wealthiest petrostate hosted a remarkable sequence of sustainability-related events: the EAERE Annual Meeting (external link) in Bergen, the SoMaTPhD School (external link) in Trondheim, the Sufficiency and Beyond (external link) workshop, (external link) and the ISEE & Degrowth Conference (external link) in Oslo. These gatherings, spanning hundreds of papers and thousands of participants, represented a rich mix of traditions including ecological economics, degrowth, and socio-material transformation; all united in their pursuit of one essential question: how can societies flourish within planetary boundaries?
From the perspective of sufficiency and the Global South, a more sobering question also emerges: What happens when the conversation on living well within limits takes place in a petrostate and this context goes unexamined?
Norway's sovereign wealth, infrastructure, and political influence are underpinned by fossil fuel exports. Yet, this paradox, fossil-fuelled prosperity alongside climate leadership, was rarely acknowledged. What does it mean to imagine futures amid ongoing oil and gas expansion? The silence reflects a missed opportunity for deeper reflection
The term sufficiency featured across events, but its depth and framing varied. In many sessions, it was cast as sustainable consumption or modest lifestyle change, conversations with merit yet often detached from sufficiency's more transformative potential. Rarely was it treated as a systemic governance principle: one that actively avoids resource demand while delivering well-being for all within planetary boundaries. (external link)
This structural understanding of sufficiency, which is central to lived realities in much of the Global South, was largely absent. When sufficiency is reduced to personal choice, its justice-oriented foundation (external link) risks being lost. Still, there were moments of insight and critique.
Speakers from Colombia, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and India challenged dominant framings. Panels on ecologically unequal exchange offered compelling alternatives. But these perspectives, while present, often remained peripheral. Epistemologies from the South were referenced, not co-anchored. Petrostate dynamics were acknowledged only in passing, if at all. And while concepts like Sumak Kawsay (external link) (external link)or Ubuntu (external link) were invoked, they did not structurally shape the framing of transformation.
If "living well within limits" is to evolve into a robust scientific, ethical, and policy framework, it must confront its own conditions of possibility. This includes re-examining who sets the agenda, how privilege manifests in academic and policy spaces, and what kinds of change we are truly willing to entertain.
This shift calls for courage over comfort and for aligning rhetoric with structure. Sufficiency, fully embraced, asks us to move beyond metrics into meaning: to build relationships across geographies, generations, and worldviews that are grounded in equity and care. In the tensions we hesitate to name, we may find the roots of real transformation.