| dc.description.abstract | Accelerating climate and environmental change requires action in all parts of society, including in the world of work. This thesis is a cross-sectoral and multi-level qualitative study of how three Norwegian trade unions––Handel og Kontor, Utdanningsforbundet, and Naturviterne––operate internally to engage with climate and environmental change as a political issue. The three cases chosen have formally decided to work on issues of environmental sustainability, which illustrates a broadening of the labour movement’s traditional privileging of social and economic concerns. To explore this, I conduct a Critical Narrative Analysis, studying the interrelations of labour actors at different levels in the organisations. I do so through a document analysis and through interviews with union employees working with sustainability issues in the organisations’ head offices, union representatives, and ordinary union members. With an entry point in the critical research tradition, I analyse how agency, identities, role perceptions, and interests affect organisational change processes, and the anchoring of policies, in order to transform them into practice with material outcomes. I find that when the three trade unions develop internal policy documents and engage in “green” collective bargaining at the national level, they do so from their organisational identities, claiming their members’ interests as workers and professionals. Furthermore, the trade unions develop discourses of environmental action that do not stretch outside the frames of the reformist and compromise-based Norwegian labour model, but ultimately act as trade unions––focused on social and financial interests. By exploring the perceptions and experiences of organised workers in relation to their trade union’s environment al sustainability strategies, I suggest that the narratives of workers depend on their identities and interests at work, but also intersects with the same dynamics outside of the workplace. I identify that there are unionised workers at the local level who are willing to participate in a sustainability transition in their role as trade union members, but they have not yet done so due to a lack of knowledge or tools to get engaged. I, thus, suggest that there are weak internal links––as in an insufficient anchoring of climate and environmental policies–– between the organisational levels in all three trade unions, which hinders a broad operationalisation of the emergent climate and environmentally-related policies. Analytically, I conclude that anchoring is a relevant concept when exploring the (dis)connection between discursive and material change, i.e., how to transform environmental concerns into action. | eng |