Just transition of coal regions in Poland. Impulses, contexts and strategic recommendations

The goals of this monograph include collecting and organizing knowledge, experience and studies related to just transition, and formulating strategic recommendations for Poland’s coal regions. It is an attempt at providing a synthetic insight into the multi-contest situations within these areas, and indicating their specificity and diversity. The complexity of the addressed issue determines the structure of the paper, which is made up of three essential chapters. The first explains the stimuli and concepts associated with just transition and broadly understood region transformation from the perspective of contemporary development concepts. The second chapter of the study focuses on diagnosing the demographic, economic, institutional, spatial and environmental standing of Poland’s coal regions. The diagnostic analyses refer to the starting state of Poland’s coal regions upon the announcement of the European Green Deal. The final chapter of this paper is normative in nature and contains an identification of the strategic stakes of just transition stakeholders, considerations related to the selection of the development concept for individual coal regions within Poland in the perspective of their situation diagnosed in the second chapter, and environmental trend scenarios impacting the potential transition paths for the analysed regions. Strategic recommendations in terms of just transition constitute the essence of this chapter, and have been formulated at domestic and regional levels.

Teams participating in the study 7 Authorship of individual chapters 9 List of abbreviations 15 Introduction 17 Chapter I. Green Deal and just transition 23 1. The European Green Deal as a new coal region transition impulses 23 2. Just transition versus regional transition in the context of selected development concepts 34 3. Best practices – selected foreign and domestic transition project-related experiences 46 Chapter II. Multidimensional context of Poland’s coal region in transition 53 1. Poland’s coal regions 53 2. Demographic context 61 3. Economic context 72 4. Institutional context 95 5. Spatial context – post-industrial areas 107 6. Environmental context 114 Chapter III. Strategic recommendation for just transition in Poland 123 1. Strategic stakes of just transition stakeholders 123 2. Development concept selection for the transition of Poland’s coal regions 148 3. The future of Poland’s coal regions in the context of green economy – contributions for foresight studies 154 4. Strategic recommendations for programming just transition in Poland – central and regional levels 161 Conclusions 207 References 213 List of figures 227 List of tables 228 Information about the Authors 230