The Shifting Narrative of Risk in the Norwegian Petroleum Industry: A Narrative Policy Framework Analysis

The year 2015 marked a shift in the formal definition of risk in the Norwegian petroleum industry. From an erstwhile understanding of risk as a combination of loss and probability, the definition changed to conceptualizing risk as ‘the consequences of an activity with associated uncertainties’. This shift has a host of practical implications for the industry, including for audit strategies as well as for the way risk assessments are conducted, which in turn have consequences for industry safety. In this paper, we treat the shift in the risk definition as a policy change, enacted by the Petroleum Safety Authority Norway (PSA-N), and seek to understand this change through the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). NPF is predicated on the salience of narrative in public policy and allows for the systematic examination of policy stories. In this paper, we trace the risk narrative produced by the main policy actors in the years between 2008 and 2022 based on documentary evidence. We use colocation network analysis and keyword analysis to make knowledge claims regarding NPF components including the setting plot, characters, narrating coalitions, and moral of the story.