Date: December 4, 2025 Time: 4:15 PM Venue: Aula Beltrami (Building 5, Leonardo Campus)

Abstract: We are currently undergoing something which is often named as “the green transition“. But what is this green transition? What are the means by which it is made to happen and how to empirically and conceptually understand it? More than understanding it as a technological shift exclusively, this lecture suggests we understand it as a distinct version of economization. And more than understanding it as a grand shift towards the green, it suggests we understand it through the tensions and new environmental conflicts it brings about and “the little  tools” of democracy, valuation and appropriation through which it is sought negotiated and handled. The lecture will delineate this approach to the study of the green transition while empirically focusing on one such little tool in particular, namely the licensing system (sometimes also called concession system). The aim is to understand its modes of justification, and invite for a broader understanding of how “nature” is procedurally and legally taken for economizing and societal ends.

Kristin Asdal is professor of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Centre Director of TIK, Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo. In her most recent monograph Nature-Made Economy: Cod, Capital and the Great Economization of the Ocean (MIT 2023) (open access) Nature-Made Economy: Cod, Capital, and the Great Economization of the Ocean | Books Gateway | MIT Press Kristin and her co-author Tone Huse analyzes the ocean economy from a valuation studies, STS and Social Studies of Markets perspective while following the Atlantic Cod as it is turned into a domesticated species, an object of innovation and worked upon in offices and documents of public administration. She is currently working with Liliana Doganova on a double special issue of Valuation Studies on Valuation and Critique in the “good economy” (Vol. 12 No. 1 (2025): (Part I) DOI: https://doi.org/10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2025.12.1. Kristin has throughout her career been engaged with method issues and has developed (with Hilde Reinertsen) practice-oriented document analysis (Doing Document Analysis: A Practice Oriented Method. SAGE research Methods 2022).