In this guest post, Zahar Koretsky discusses his research and findings of the recent article in Environmental Politics – From miners to markets: discursive struggle in Romania’s coal phase-out.
In recent years, attacks on sustainability transition policy goals and practices have increased globally. Narratives sceptical of climate change and hostile to climate action gained momentum and manifested in election results in many countries. These narratives frame sustainability transition policies as economically harmful, socially divisive, or incompatible with national security and geopolitical realities. Coupled with global instability and rising military expenditures, these dynamics have been putting the difficult wins of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate action under serious threat.
In our Environmental Politics article, we look back at a case of a previous comparable period of political instability in Europe, leveraged by external actors to advance macro-political agendas and influence domestic and regional politics.
Production of Political Losers
In our historical investigation of the closure of coal mining in Romania between the 1990s and 2010s, we were interested in the unprecedented speed of this phase-out. We were not satisfied with a neoliberal explanation: That the mines were never profitable and that this was masked by the state-socialist authorities before the regime change in 1989. In the paper, we tap into discursive institutionalist accounts of how framing becomes politically consequential.
The central implication of our study is that discursive defeat can precede material defeat. Romanian coal miners were first framed as obsolete and then economically decimated by mine closures. This involved a struggle over the meaning of the miners’ economic and social worth in the politically turbulent post-socialist Romanian society. The actors promoting the neoliberal reform to close the mines drew discursive power from foreign donor conditionality, EU accession criteria and the credibility of foreign press. They leveraged macro-political dynamics – specifically, the post-socialist transition toward a neoliberal market economy – and accompanied it with a discourse of the inevitability of reform. Coal decline was framed as an economic necessity, the reform as “not negotiable,” and alternative options as implausible or “miraculous.”
De-Structuration
Much environmental politics scholarship uses the concepts of discourse coalitions, structuration, and institutionalisation to study struggles over meaning. Our work suggests that this is only one side of what powerful coalitions do in rapid transitions. We therefore propose an inverse process that describes what happened with coal mining in Romania: Discourse de-structuration, the deliberate undermining of previously dominant frames and the opponents’ structuration work, often presented as natural, economic, or technocratic necessity. Discourse de-structuration in the Romanian case also involved a masking of the role of discourse coalitions in discursive struggle over coal mining and framing coal mining phase-out exclusively as an endogenous choice of Romanian people.
Discourse de-structuration is meant to complement existing accounts of legitimacy. It aligns with recent coal phase-out research showing the salience of discourse coalitions and storylines in shaping phase-out politics (e.g., in Germany). Where the Romanian case pushes further is in foregrounding strategic erasure of pre-existing meanings of coal and coal mining and concealment of external agency, which presents coal mining phase-out as endogenous or natural rather than as a product of policy choices and discourse de-structuration. The paper shows how exogenous actors leveraged political instability in the country and the broader region and imported own framings of coal mining and coal miners.
In sum, our study points to the importance of the ability to be the subject – and not the object – of framing of what and who is rational, legitimate, compatible with reality. While the paper does not go in-depth into this, this can imply that climate action today could adopt strategies to entice those actors who are willing and able to do so effectively, to get involved in discourse de-structuration of fossil-fuel incumbents and fossil fuels themselves.
Bio
Zahar Koretsky is an Assistant Professor in Sustainability Transformations and Digital Innovation at Nyenrode Business University and a visiting fellow at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His main research topics are sustainability transformations and technology phase-outs.
