Norway

Norway's governance model demonstrates what happens when a resource-rich democracy creates institutional constraints before resource wealth arrives. The sovereign wealth fund was established in 1990, six years before significant oil revenues began flowing, creating a savings mechanism that prevented the resource curse that afflicts most petrostates. The fiscal rule — spending no more than 3% of the fund's value annually — decouples government spending from oil price volatility, providing countercyclical fiscal capacity that most resource-dependent nations lack. Norway's EEA membership provides single market access without EU membership, giving it trade benefits while retaining sovereignty over fisheries, agriculture, and energy policy. The political system produces coalition or minority governments, with the Labour Party historically dominant but no longer commanding majority support. The biological parallel is an organism that evolved a storage organ (the fund) specifically to buffer against environmental volatility — a metabolic reserve that most species develop through evolution but that Norway created through deliberate institutional design.