The Political Ecology of Pee and Poo

This thesis investigates how the metabolic rift and peak phosphorus are represented in Norwegian media and policy documents. The investigation is done with the use of critical discourse analysis. The material investigated consists of 28 texts from Norwegian newspapers and two documents from the Norwegian Environment Agency. The theoretical framework is based on the theory of hegemony, infrastructure lock-in and path dependency theory. The analysis shows that technology and neoliberal economics have a hegemonic role in the domain of peak phosphorus and the metabolic rift. There are discursive struggles between the hegemonic discourses and other more critical sub-discourses. I argue that the hegemonic discourses substantiate the lock-in of the water-based sewage system. The current system is technology installed to solve a problem partly created by technology, while forging new problems. In the material, there is no discussion of the water-based sewage system as part of the problem, which underlines the argument that this is a lock-in