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.