| dc.description.abstract | Food security is a central pillar of Norwegian as well as international food policy, making it an interesting area of further inquiry. The goal of this thesis is to contribute to knowledge about food security and its discursive and social effects. I have done this by conducting a ‘what is the problem represented to be?’ analysis of landmark white papers and a selection of political strategies published between 2008 and 2023. My research questions are: 1) How is food security problematized in Norwegian national agricultural policy between 2008 and 2023? and 2) In what ways is food security being envisioned as a path towards an inclusive and sustainable society? I draw on transformation literature and a relational understanding of capitalism in the analysis. A central contribution from the transformation literature is the framework of leverage points for change. This gives me a tool to grasp what kind of decision- and meaning-making occurs in the policy. Furthermore, it allows me to suggest some possible consequences of the problematization of food security in the text corpus. Distinguishing the project of capitalism on the one hand, and capitalism as a historical process on the other, is helpful to understand discursive and social effects of the way food security is represented in the text corpus. I argue that when population growth is at the forefront of the food security discourse, the obvious solution becomes ramping up food production. I highlight the way measurement of population is used as a political tool, compare the way global and national population growth is problematized and suggest some possible consequences for this way of understanding the problem of food security. Then, I look at how the policy constructs a narrative of agricultural development since and pay attention to the binary of industrialized/developing countries. I discuss implications for relations between humans and nature and argue that the problematization of food security obscures alternative ways of addressing the issue of hunger. The green revolution is identified as the cornerstone for agricultural development in the 20th century and frames the second part of the analysis. I argue that the related concepts of economic and sustainable development are central to the emerging solution to the future of food security in the text corpus. Then, I analyze innovation as a key concept in the policy and ask if the way innovation is conceptualized suggests that the policy is attempting to move the sector in the direction of a new green revolution to achieve increased food production. In light of this, critically examine the issue of hunger as it is conceived in the text corpus. | eng |