Dominant discourses of Green Growth and the Swedish North: A topic model of the “green” transition in Swedish news media, 2015–2023

The news media coverage and debate concerning a so-called green transition [den “gröna” omställningen] in northern Sweden has gained momentum in the past few years. The transition marks ongoing developments within traditional industries, such as mining, steel, and energy production, as well as car manufacturing. Significant financial investments have been made in relation to climate change to decrease these industries’ heavy carbon emissions, and in order to make them (almost) fossil-free (Larsson, 2022; Näsman et al., 2023).

The so-called green transition in the Swedish North constitutes an interesting case to study since these “green” developments also impact the local societies in complex and intersecting ways. Furthermore, the ecological and social gains are both at times questioned (e.g., Amnesty International, 2025; de Leeuw, 2024). We refer to the developments as the “so-called” or “green” transition to avoid contributing to discourses that take the “greenness” for granted, and in order to highlight ongoing contestations. This particular case is also of general importance since the Swedish North is put forth as a global forerunner when it comes to the climate crisis, and the stakes are high, not only locally, but also for the nation-state and within the European Union (Eriksson et al., 2024; Larsson, 2022).

News media are important actors when it comes to making sense of the “green” transition in northern Sweden. They are central to other stakeholders, like politicians, industry leaders, and engaged citizens, and so on, who compete for influence over how to understand the ongoing development. The democratic role of journalism is imperative, and news media represent public arenas for deliberation of common issues and, in many cases, facilitate debate and provide vital information to the public on issues regarding the climate crisis (Schäfer & Painter, 2021). Journalists also present critical perspectives and investigations of institutions and people in power (Egan Sjölander, 2021). Different actors with potentially conflicting views on contentious issues can also connect and gather in media debates (Eskjær & Horsbøl, 2023).

Discourses in news media regarding complex “green” transitions, we argue, can thus be understood as pivotal sense-making, where transition processes are publicly understood and debated. This sense-making of the climate crisis can be viewed as an ongoing discursive struggle with articulations of hegemonic understandings evolving vis-à-vis contestations (Laclau & Mouffe, 2014; Nicoletta & Carpentier, 2022). Hence, we find merit in critically exploring news media as prime sites of discursive formations, contributing to the public understanding of “the commons”, in this instance, multi-faceted ongoing changes of the Swedish North.

When it comes to previous research concerning news media, the environment, and climate change, most studies have focused on content (e.g., Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004; Hase et al., 2021; Horta et al., 2017), less on journalistic production (Schäfer & Painter, 2021), and a changing media landscape (e.g., Lischinsky & Egan Sjölander, 2014). To date, this research has also mostly focused on international and national news media (Anderson, 2015; Bohr, 2020; Egan Sjölander, 2021; Schäfer & Schlichting, 2014). This highlights a knowledge gap and a need for research that studies regional and local news media coverage and debate in studies of the environment and climate.

The “green” transition is embedded in the local setting of the Swedish North, making the geographical context important to consider. Earlier studies of media, as well as policy discourses of the Swedish North, have shown that they tend to reproduce relationships of power that depict the northernmost regions of the country as a periphery, in opposition to the centre (i.e., capital) in the Swedish South. Depopulation (Eriksson, 2010), an ageing population (Ljuslinder, 2017), and the Swedish North as a financial burden for the country (Nilsson & Lundgren, 2015) have been identified as prevalent themes in such discourses. At the same time, recurring historical perspectives of the Swedish North identify the region as “The Land of the Future” (Sörlin, 2023), particularly because of its richness in natural resources. There are few studies to date that, like we, focus specifically on the role of news media when it comes to the contemporary so-called green transition in northern Sweden. However, we have identified emerging research that bases its analysis, at least partly, on media material (e.g., Eriksson et al., 2024; Nuottaniemi, 2024; Persson & Dymitrow, 2024), even if none have such a large dataset or have covered such a long period as we do here.

This study aims to identify and analyse discourses in news media concerning the so-called green transition in the Swedish North. We use discourse analysis in combination with topic modelling to trace and interpret dominant discourses in the news media coverage and debate of the “green” transition. Our analysed corpus (N = 9,755) consists of published news and op-eds about the “green” transition in Swedish news media (both print and online) between 2015 and 2023, hence covering the period from before any large investment took place until they increased significantly. Our research questions are as follows:

RQ1. Which topics and overarching themes are present in news media coverage and debate concerning the so-called green transition of the Swedish North, and how do the topics correlate?

RQ2. How are discourses of the “green” transition formed, which articulations are dominant, and which ones are marginalised?

It is not self-evident to define the Swedish North, or Norrland, as the region is often referred to in Swedish. This geographical area constitutes a large part of the country, as much as two-thirds of it, and includes five counties. By referring to this region as a homogenous place, one risks generalising a large and diverse area (Eriksson, 2010). Important to bear in mind is also that the Swedish North is part of Sápmi – Indigenous Sámi land colonised by the Swedish State (Sörlin, 2023; Össbo, 2023). There have been many instances of mistreatment against Sámi people throughout history, and also of other marginalised groups living in the North, such as Lantalaiset, Tornedalians, and Kvens (Lantto, 2014; Persson, 2018, 2023). The impact of, for example, extractive industries on Indigenous people remains a critical issue in the “green” transition (Cambou, 2020; de Leeuw, 2024; Össbo, 2023).

The definitions of the Swedish North are discursively formed and thereby infused by interconnected ideas and particular understandings of the place that have evolved over time (Massey, 1994a, 1994b). One can identify a recurring tension between representations of northern Sweden as a national asset (Sörlin, 2023) and views of the Swedish North as something problematic and peripheral (Eriksson, 2010). The Swedish North has been seen as an internal “Other”, as a place where national resources could be easily sourced, exposing the region to long-lived injustices (Eriksson, 2010; Nilsson & Lundgren, 2015).

The present “green” development in the Swedish North is largely based on investments by traditional industrial stakeholders introducing new technologies and production processes to become fossil-free. The supply and increased use of renewable energy are crucial for this to happen. Not only does the reindustrialisation include unprecedented investments of up to 1,000 billion Swedish kronor (Näsman et al., 2023), but it also encompasses broad societal transitions, permeating multiple, not to say all, sectors of society. The population is meant to grow steeply, with a sizeable impact on the tax base and social welfare (Larsson, 2022). Justice issues and different conflicts, not least regarding the use and rights to land and resources, are also crucial aspects of these developments (de Leeuw, 2024; Össbo, 2023).

Persson and Dymitrow (2024: 56) recently summarised that most earlier research on the so-called green transition in Sweden has focused on “the feasibility of the planned trajectory of the green transition in general and its social consequences specifically”. Key concepts such as “green growth” and different dimensions of justice have been studied (Fischer et al., 2024; Garbis et al., 2024), as well as the impact of green colonialism in Indigenous people’s lives, traditions, and livelihoods (Cambou, 2020; Össbo, 2023).

Mediated representations of the ongoing “green” transition have also, at least in part, focused on how news media and government discourses represent Norrland as “the future” or as “a struggle” (Persson & Dymitrow, 2024). “Logics of competition” have also shaped ideas of the transition related to the large industrial establishment in the municipality of Skellefteå (Eriksson et al., 2024). Both these studies identify representations of the Swedish North as a region in transition, being weak and suffering from depopulation and stagnation. The industrial developments become articulated as beneficial solutions for change. Notions of Sweden as a trailblazer nation in climate mitigation and adaptation are also present (Eriksson et al., 2024; Persson & Dymitrow, 2024). However, conflicts of interest in the so-called green transition are revealed, and difficulties in obtaining the estimated needed population growth are highlighted.

Persson and Dymitrow (2024) concluded that the development of the “green” transition becomes discursively naturalised in news and policy. Nuottaniemi (2024) also observed that media reports of the “green” transition present it as an essential solution to the climate crisis, vis-à-vis other “perceived issues” of the Swedish North. Eriksson and colleagues (2024) argued that the local press legitimised the industrial developments in Skellefteå and that there is a risk of colonial relations being reproduced, portraying the Swedish North as an internal Other, valuable largely by resource extraction. They also found that voices from the Sámi population were largely absent in the main local newspaper in Skellefteå, Norran.

Even if few in number and limited to relatively small empirical samples, these studies provide important input for comparisons. So do international studies of how news media deal with the worldwide “green”, often labelled energy transition, be it about biogas in Finland (Lyytimäki et al., 2018), Power-to-X in Denmark (Horsbøl, 2024), wind power in the UK (Batel, 2020), or renewable energy in Portugal (Valquaresma et al., 2024). All of these stress and critique media’s pivotal role and the current lack of knowledge about these mediated environmental conflicts. In this article, we aim to add to the current scope of knowledge by analysing an inclusive dataset of Swedish news and debate regarding the “green” transition in the Swedish North, published over nine years. In addition to including different types of news media (national outlets, as well as regional and local), we were able to trace dominant discursive patterns in this ongoing media coverage and debate of the “green” transition, which is important given the scale and speed of the changes.

Issues of the environment and climate are inherently complex and can be understood and made sense of in many ways. The multitude of perspectives that arise can, in our view, be explored with the concept of discourse understood “as a shared way of apprehending the world” (Dryzek, 2013: 9), including both objects and social practices, in this case particularly relating to the environment and climate. Discourse is, according to Laclau and Mouffe (2014), produced by articulations that link elements together and continuously change social identities. In the words of Howarth (2000: 102–103), a forest standing in the place of a suggested new motorway “may simply represent an inconvenient obstacle impeding the rapid implementation of a new road system, or it might be viewed as a site of special interest for scientists and naturalists, or as a symbol of the nation’s threatened natural heritage”. We see discourse as productive and contingent and always connected to questions of power, conflict, and the constant struggle over meaning, in which some discourses become hegemonic in specific contexts (Egan Sjölander, 2011; Foucault, 1971; Laclau & Mouffe, 2014).

Environmental discourses change over time. To begin with, there is a difference between perspectives that accept or deny the human impact on climate change and other ecological problems. Climate scepticism is characterised by the dismissal of any need for change (Anshelm & Hultman, 2015). When agreeing on the basic assumption that humans have an environmental and climate impact, another discursive demarcation concerns the view on the current system of political and economic organisation of society, as well as the construction of problems and subsequent solutions in environmental and climate issues. In a global context, sustainable development and ecological modernisation are dominating discourses that accept the current political and economic systems (Dryzek, 2013; Hajer, 1995). Sustainable development discourse, as broadly established in the Brundtland report (WCED, 1987), is often referred to as constructed by three pillars of ecological, economic, and social sustainability and aims to overcome conflicts between these varied goals. In ecological modernisation discourse, the values of economic growth and environmental improvement are in turn considered “essentially complementary”, rather than purely feasible to achieve together (Dryzek, 2013: 16). This latter discourse is marked by a strong focus on technology, market solutions, and policymaking as central tools to mitigate climate change.

Both discourses are broad and diverse. The definition of sustainable development has, for example, been questioned, negotiated, and adapted in many iterations (Dryzek, 2013). Furthermore, ecological modernisation has been conceptualised by both strong and weak variants (Christoff, 1996).

Alternative discourses rejecting the neoliberal political and economic system can instead, for example, be conceptualised as green radicalism (Dryzek, 2013) or eco-socialist discourse (Anshelm & Hultman, 2015). These incorporate a substantial set of variations and internal debates. However, they are united by growth-critical views and often promote non-anthropocentric perspectives of human and nature relationships and power dynamics. Social justice is also a strong focus (Dryzek, 2013).

In this study, we have used discourse analysis (Egan Sjölander, 2011; Laclau & Mouffe, 2014) as the main analytical framework, combined with topic modelling based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) using Mallet (McCallum, 2002). The combination of computational and interpretive methods for text analysis has allowed us to study discourses of the so-called green transition of the Swedish North in a large set of news media data. The approach has the potential to increase the value of both methodologies, where the study of large datasets can capture repetition, generating dominant patterns and gradual changes, whilst the theoretical basis of discourse can support the interpretation of topic models (Jacobs & Tschötschel, 2019; Törnberg & Törnberg, 2016). Several other studies of news reports on the environment and climate have used computational methods; however, many have focused on comparative analyses (e.g., Hase et al., 2021; McAllister et al., 2024; Vu et al., 2019) rather than local contexts.

Topic modelling has turned out to be very useful when creating an overview of topics or identifying thematic structures in a large text corpus (Blei, 2012; Sanford et al., 2021). In LDA topic modelling, topics are identified through calculations of probability based on Bayesian statistics relating to two main matrices defining the probability of words belonging to a topic, and the probability of a topic belonging to a specific document (Maier et al., 2018), which in our dataset consist of one published news media text. Topics capture repetition and configurations of language use in context, which form discursive patterns (Jacobs & Tschötschel, 2019). We have applied a stepwise method inspired by practices of previous studies and guidelines for topic modelling in media and communication research (Maier et al., 2018; Meier & Eskjær, 2024) and also adapted the model to suit the discourse analytical framework. The different steps are 1) pre-processing the data, 2) model specification, and 3) interpretation, evaluation, and analysis of the model.

The empirical selection of data for analysis is texts – both editorial and op-ed pieces – that have been published in print and digital Swedish news media, both national outlets and regional and local outlets. The texts have been collected from the news media archive Retriever. The parameters of selection include the studied period, starting in 2015, when none of the major industrial investments had been made, and ending at the beginning of December 2023, at the time of data collection. Topic modelling for discourse analysis has been argued to require a thematically cohesive corpus (Jacobs & Tschötschel, 2019). We used a search string including “Northern Sweden” [Norra Sverige] and lexical variances of words or phrases such as “green transition”, “societal transition/adaptation”, and “reindustrialisation” to retrieve the empirical material. The search string is an important parameter of the method and impacts the results (for the full search string, see the Appendix). The whole corpus, or dataset, consists of 9,806 media texts. About half of the texts were published in regional and local outlets from Norrbotten and Västerbotten (see Table 1).

Pre-processing the data is another important part of topic modelling that influences the results (Maier et al., 2018). We followed a practice similar to Meier and Eskjær (2024) regarding “near-duplicates” and “exact-duplicates”: We kept the former and removed the latter. Our argument for this is that near-duplicates – similar or almost identical texts published by different news sources – are part of the production of discourse; hence, it would be wrong not to include them. This resulted in a corpus of 9,755 texts, which was subsequently tokenised and lemmatised (Maier et al., 2018). Common Swedish stop-words were then removed (Bird et al., 2009).

The model specification in LDA topic modelling requires the researcher to determine the number of topics (K) of the model. This is determined by the corpus, the context, and the theoretical outset (Maier et al., 2018; Meier & Eskjær, 2024). In this study, we decided on the number of topics by running multiple models and comparing the results based on the stability of the topics and how well the topics could be interpreted discursively. Multiple iterations of models were run, with the number of topics differentiating from 20 to 200. Models with topics closer to the middle (of 20–200) were considered to provide the best results for discursive clarity. To systematise the process of further comparison, as well as to control the reliability between the interpretations of the different researchers, and the validity of the topics, the three researchers individually test-coded models with 60 and 100 topics and collaboratively coded a model of 140. The test coding showed that the researchers generally made similar interpretations of the validity of the topics, with conformity ranging from 88–96 per cent, and that models allowing more topics resulted in more precise and specific topics (Maier et al., 2018). Models with a relatively large number of topics have also been argued to be fruitful when combined with discourse studies (Jacobs & Tschötschel, 2019).

The process of labelling the topics (K = 140) requires interpretation by the researcher, and preexisting knowledge of the empirical material is therefore crucial (Brett, 2012) to understand texts in relevant contexts, which is a core element in any discourse analysis (Egan Sjölander, 2011). Topics also allow researchers to go back to specific texts for qualitative inquiry, which we did by manually examining top-weighted texts. We also excluded topics that all three researchers found to lack “meaning” or coherence (Maier et al., 2018; Meier & Eskjær, 2024), resulting in the removal of ten topics, leaving 130 topics for further analysis. These topics were clustered into themes depending on their similarity, resulting in 13 overarching themes (presented in Table 2), which facilitated the identification of discursive patterns. To further study these patterns, we explored how different elements recurringly were connected within the media texts (Jacobs & Tschötschel, 2019), by correlations between topics, using Gephi for illustration (Bastian et al., 2009), as presented in Figure 2. The source code of the topic model and analytical tools has been made public in accordance with open data initiatives, as a GitHub repository (Humlab, 2024).

The analysis of published articles and op-eds from Swedish news media between 2015 and 2023 incorporates when the “green” investments in the Swedish North took off, which was then followed by an increased media interest, as shown in Figure 1. The coverage and debate grew significantly in 2021, shortly after the government appointed a civil servant designated to facilitate the establishment of large “green” businesses like Hybrit in northern Sweden. Another company’s, H2 Green Steel (now Stegra), decision to start fossil-free steel production in Boden was also an event that generated media attention. Generally, the 130 topics of our model followed the same pattern, although there were exceptions, and this, to some extent, indicated event-driven news reporting, in line with previous studies exploring journalism concerning environmental and climate issues (Bohr, 2020; Hase et al., 2021; Schmidt et al., 2013). For example, a topic concerning the industrial development in Skellefteå peaked in 2017, when the company Northvolt announced the establishment of a battery factory in the municipality (Eriksson et al., 2024).

Figure 1

Number of texts in the corpus (distribution per year)

Comments: Collection ended 4 December 2023.

All topics identified in the corpus were clustered into 13 themes, presented in Table 2 (all individual topics, the top 15 words of each topic, and rank-1 metrics are presented in the Appendix). Multiple themes concern different aspects of the transition, and its prerequisites, as well as actors or sectors managing it. The context of the Swedish North and central places of investments was also prominent, as well as themes concerning the impact of the transition.

In the following sections, we analyse how topics, topic correlations, and major themes contribute to the formation of what we conceptualise as two dominant and intersecting discourses in the news media reporting and debate about the “green” transition of the Swedish North.

First, we identify a Green Growth discourse that highlights beneficial but also challenging dimensions of the transition. Many articulations of the “green” transition concern a transition of energy and increased electrification, including a strong belief in management, technology, and market solutions when solving environmental problems.

Second, we identify a Swedish North discourse that treats the influence and tensions of place, foremost illustrated by articulations of the region as a “Land of the Future” (Sörlin, 2023) or as a problematic periphery (Eriksson, 2010). These two discourses coexist and, taken together, become dominant in the sense-making of the “green” transition.

However, we also identified marginalised articulations that contested the dominant discourses. These often highlighted ecological and social problems following increased energy use and resource extractivism. They challenged the notion of the stipulated growth, and its “greenness”, and therefore have the potential to destabilise the dominant discourses.

A Green Growth discourse: Energy transition as the key instrument for change

To explore the formation of the Green Growth discourse, we examined significant themes, as well as correlations between topics. The proportionally largest theme in the corpus was Energy and energy production (17%), demonstrating its centrality in the news media. This might be of no surprise since the “green” transition largely presupposes that fossil fuels can be replaced or phased out completely in order to tackle climate change (Jacobson, 2023; Molek-Kozakowska, 2023), what Stegemann and Ossewaarde (2018) in turn called a “sustainable myth”. The energy theme was comprised of topics forming discursive patterns in which energy and energy production were articulated as issues related to the market and politics, such as access, distribution, prices, production, and, not least, the increased need for fossil-free energy. These were coupled with other topics in the Green Growth discourse regarding wind, nuclear, solar, and hydro power as alternative energy sources, and hydrogen as an energy carrier and innovation. In line with previous research (Djerf-Pierre et al., 2016), mediated representations of the environment and climate in a Swedish context largely frame technological development, such as the use of renewable energy sources, as key components of environmental solutions.

The prominence of the energy transition theme speaks to the pivotal role of energy and energy production as one of the most central articulations in the news media texts of the “green” transition. To use renewable or fossil-free energy sources in the Swedish energy system has become a vital driving force for beneficial change and the rapid process of increased electrification in society as a whole. This discursively formed line of reasoning fits well with how Dryzek (2013) described dominant understandings of both sustainable development and ecological modernisation, not least given its strong focus on technology in order to solve environmental problems. Similar understandings of environmental problems have also been identified in other countries, for example, the UK (Carvalho, 2005).

The large focus on fossil-free energy alternatives in the discourse can also be viewed as a form of substitutionalism (Nicoletta & Carpentier, 2022), where energy production and use can stay the same, or even grow, thanks to technological advancements. These types of articulations risk ratifying an increased electricity demand. This discursive growth-logic was evident within this and adjacent themes in the whole corpus. Despite widespread agreement regarding the aim of the energy transition in the news media, more challenging articulations were also identified, including topics debating energy alternatives such as nuclear and wind power, energy forms that have been and are currently being debated in Sweden (Anshelm & Hultman, 2015; Garbis et al., 2024). The focus on energy in relation to the climate, “green” transition, and fossil-free energy alternatives, and the beneficial impact and associated challenges with an increase, can be illustrated by quotes from two opinion pieces:

In just a few years, a new green industry has emerged in northern Sweden. This includes investments in fossil-free steel, new battery factories, and enormous data centres. Additionally, the transportation sector must be electrified if we are to meet climate goals. According to some estimates, electricity demand will increase by 400 per cent by 2050 [translated].

(Heimbrand, 2021, August 2, in Norran)

The entire country is looking towards the Swedish North. Hundreds of billions of SEK are to be invested in hydrogen transitions, fossil-free steel, critical minerals, forest products, and industrial solutions. These investments contribute to a sustainable future and provide jobs and prosperity in the Swedish North. However, the industrial transition requires electricity, a lot of electricity [translated].

(Nordqvist et al., 2021, November 7, in Hudiksvalls Tidning)

Other significant themes, such as Politics and political administration (13%) and Industries and industrial actors (10%), shaped the discourse and focused on central sectors, the management, and prominent actors of the “green” transition. These results correspond with other studies that have illustrated the prominence of such actors in Swedish news about renewable energy (Djerf-Pierre et al., 2016), as well as in Finnish news regarding biogas (Lyytimäki et al., 2018). The centrality of these themes indicates discursive agency and leadership, where the “green” transition is largely articulated as a development in which these sectors and elite actors have a prominent role. Political decision-making, policy, industrial actors, and the market can therefore be seen as key components when dealing with environmental issues, which corresponds with ecological modernisation discourse (Christoff, 1996; Dryzek, 2013). This discourse centres industrial endeavours that focus on new technology and innovation, such as “green” steel production, as a desirable way of becoming fossil-free.

The Climate and climate change theme (3%) was relatively small in comparison to others. This surprised us at first, since the problem of climate change constitutes a fundament for the transition. But it could be precisely the hegemony of the climate crisis in Sweden that renders this relative absence. Even if climate scepticism has been identified also in Swedish public debates, these articulations are marginal in comparison (Anshelm & Hultman, 2015). In this particular study, no topic of climate scepticism appeared, which might indicate that the problem of climate change is widely accepted. Or, it might signify that the “green” transition is mainly understood as an energy transition challenge, which in turn will solve the problem of climate change.

We also examined discursive formations by exploring how topics form patterns and relate to one another (Jacobs & Tschötschel, 2019). In our analysis of topic correlations, we found that the topic of Growth and development stood out as central in the whole network graph (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

Topic correlation network

Comments: The diagram shows the main network of topics co-occurring in the same document. Topics have been calculated as co-occurring if they both have a weight over 0.22 in the documents and correlate in ten documents or more. Node size reflects the degree of co-occurrences. Edge size reflects the number of documents the topics co-occur in.

Figure 2 illustrates correlations in which two topics correlate within the same text. Being the node with the largest number of other topics connected to it, we understand Growth and development as a central nodal point (Laclau & Mouffe, 2014) and will focus on it, and other examples of strong correlations, in the following section. We propose that it indicates how central the values of growth and the language of business (Hajer, 1995) are in these media texts. The relatively strong correlation between the topics of Growth and development and Development needs of fossil-free energy (see Figure 2) again illustrates the focus on energy transitions and electrification in this discourse and highlights the emphasis on green growth.

Another strong correlation is found between Growth and development and a topic labelled Possibilities, innovation, and leadership. (Translated) headlines such as “The Swedish North is world leading in the climate transition of basic industries” (Luleå University of Technology. 2021, March 20, in Norrbottens-Kuriren) or “Västerbotten is a pioneer in the transition” (Carstedt & Ågren Wikström, 2023, January 24, in Norran) articulate these connections. These examples also highlight the “Nordic exceptionalism” (Nicoletta & Carpentier, 2022) within the discourse, and the role of Sweden as a leading nation when it comes to sustainability recurringly found in studies on green transitions and climate discourse (Anshelm & Hultman, 2015; Eriksson et al., 2024; Persson & Dymitrow, 2024). However, such competitive logics of leading the “green” global race towards a more climate-friendly future are not unique for Sweden, but are found in other countries too, for example, Portugal (Valquaresma et al., 2024).

Persson and Dymitrow (2024: 64) described the green transition as discursively naturalised in media representations, since it is being “repeatedly proclaimed as the right way forward” and an “inevitable transition ‘for the better’”. Our analysis further shows that economic growth and development are values that hold an important position in the discursive formation, highlighting how ecological and economic developments are seen as complementary (Dryzek, 2013).

However, other types of articulations also recur, for example, regarding how sound the economy of the “green” transition is. One such topic concerns debates on “green” steel production (see the Appendix), in which the high financial risks of the ventures are discussed. This particular critique challenges the intended economic gain from the “green” investments and questions how financially stable the fossil-free steel production will be. Even so, the “green” transition as such is not contested. After our data collection ended in December 2023, there has also been substantial news media coverage and debate relating to the battery producer Northvolt’s unfolding severe financial crisis and bankruptcy on 12 March 2025 (Carlén et al., 2025, March 12, on Sveriges Television).

The Green Growth discourse is thus formed by articulations regarding the energy transition, politics, and industry. Furthermore, growth and development hold a prominent position in the discursive patterns of topics. We argue that the discourse goes in line with the characteristics of sustainable development and ecological modernisation since ecological challenges are seen as something solvable within the current societal systems, combining growth and ecological solutions by restructuring such systems (Dryzek, 2013).

The topics, their correlations, and the overarching themes in the analysed news media coverage and debates about the “green” transition of the Swedish North show the formation of two contingent and dominant discourses concerning the ongoing “green” transition: a Green Growth discourse and a Swedish North discourse. These, in turn, intersect, vis-á-vis other marginal articulations that contest, for example, increased resource extraction for renewable energy use and the continuous pressures put on Sámi communities.

Despite these patterns, it is also evident that the dominant discourses include a large span of themes, topics, and different perspectives. However, the development of the “green” transition was generally shown to be naturalised as the way forward, or as phrased by Nuottaniemi (2024), to be both a solution to the environmental and climate crisis and the perceived issues of the Swedish North as a periphery. The viewpoint that industrial or technological implementations are leading to both environmental improvement and local progress has also been prominent in Danish (Horsbøl, 2024) and Finnish (Lyytimäki et al., 2018) news media. This combination is powerful, and mimics when the “Ethanol Dream” was articulated as the fuel of the future within the same so-called Biofuel Region about twenty years ago (Egan Sjölander et al., 2014). Then, it was the forest-rich Swedish North that would solve the global climate crisis through the production and exportation of second-generation biofuels for cars. This mega-project eventually “failed” but was initially boosted by both local and national news media.

That the “green” transition is again being articulated as an instrument for progress in the Swedish North reproduces the region as an asset or a struggle, including centre and periphery tensions between North and South (Eriksson, 2010), here largely present in debates about energy. New centres in the Swedish North are also formed in the discourses, implying that other places at the same time get “left behind”.

The analysed discourses are shown to largely follow the logics of sustainable development and ecological modernisation discourse (Dryzek, 2013; Hajer, 1995). Alternative and more radical discourses were at the same time marginalised, since the “green” transition largely meant “business as usual”, at least beyond the replacement of fossil fuels and extensive electrification. The constant strive for economic growth as an inherent dimension of capitalist societies is seldom questioned in the discourses, even if it is the main drive of natural resource exploitation. Many critical viewpoints concern how the political and economic systems work, but not the structures themselves. This inevitably increases the risk of legitimising interests and structures that lead to continued environmental degradation (Dias et al., 2020; Hajer, 1995) and unjust developments (Cambou, 2020). However, a radical transformation to sustainability, Temper and colleagues (2018: 761) argued, must be based on “values and ideologies that overtly reject hegemonic economic and political practices, that aims to confront and subvert hegemonic power relations, that is multi-dimensional and intersectional, balancing ecological concerns with social, economic, cultural and democratic spheres”.

The aim of this study was not only to identify and discuss dominant discourses of the “green” transition, but also to try to identify what possible articulations appeared marginal. We identified some contestations akin to green radicalism or eco-socialist discourse (Anshelm & Hultman, 2015; Dryzek, 2013). But different justice perspectives (Eskjær & Horsbøl, 2023; Valquaresma et al., 2024) that are otherwise often understood as crucial to consider in relation to “green” transitions are largely missing in the media. There are also few examples of Indigenous voices regarding the “green” transition in the corpus, and it appears as if Sámi perspectives are mainly lifted in relation to reindeer-herding and land-use conflicts. This reproduces stereotypical portrayals of Sámi issues in news media, also found in previous research (J:son Lönn, 2017).

We argue for the need for more variations in the journalistic coverage and public debates to better include other views on the “green” transition than industrial and political actors’ (Horsbøl, 2024; Valquaresma et al., 2024). In the words of Mouffe (2000: 104), “we have to accept that every consensus exists as a temporary result of a provisional hegemony, as a stabilization of power, and that it always entails some form of exclusion”. We also lack variations when it comes to alternative ways of understanding and treating nature beyond the hegemonic anthropocentric worldview, which positions humans above nature (Dryzek, 2013). Citizen perspectives in general, and social movements like environmental and climate activism, also had a marginal position in the studied discourses that render critique from justice perspectives (Temper et al., 2018; Valquaresma et al., 2024). This is problematic in our view, given the all-encompassing societal changes that the current reindustrialisation entails, and the large impact on local communities. In this sense, the news media seem to partly fail to engage their publics, hence not fulfilling their democratic role (Eskjær & Horsbøl, 2023; Schäfer & Painter, 2021). The Northvolt bankruptcy in March 2025 and the widespread consequences of that, both locally and nationally, illustrate the high risks involved.

And finally, since this study provides a first overview of a relatively large set of news media texts treating a complex process over a long period, the presented results need to be complemented with additional in-depth analysis of different dimensions and intersections articulated in these complex discourses. We therefore propose future research in this area that investigates specific news media topics and themes, and work that includes other forms of media dealing with the “green” transition, for example, podcasts and social media content. Multimodal approaches and visual analysis of the “green” transition are also key to undertake. The journalistic production process at large also deserves more attention from scholars (Schäfer & Painter, 2021). This is crucial if we intend to better grasp how the global climate crisis is played out both nationally and locally, and how discourses in news media of a “green” transition take shape in the Swedish North.