The aim of this paper is to present and explain the perception and reception of the European Green Deal agenda. The paper will use the discourse analysis to contextualize governmental communication and policies. Furthermore, changes in public opinion and bottom-up pro-ecological activities will be presented. The analysis will include references to the protection of the environment and climate change alleviation as present in the parliamentary and presidential campaigns of 2019, 2020 and 2023, changes in public opinion, increasing awareness of the challenges connected with greenhouse gas emissions, and ecological social movements. The leading methodology and perspective of the paper will be a discourse analysis that focuses on various narratives present in Polish politics. One of the narratives as present in governmental documents seems to be focusing on reconciling the national interests and climate change alleviation, promising energy security, affordable electricity and environment protection. The second narrative centres around funding and optimal use of EU funds, presenting the European Green Deal as a chance for Polish businesses and economy. The third narrative present in the discourse of environmental social movements activists emphasises the disastrous effects of lack of action and moral obligation to take initiative. While structural determinants pose a significant challenge and barrier to a smooth transition into a greener economy, it is worth acknowledging political and social factors that impact what is seen as feasible and desirable.

Scientific knowledge on the causes and impacts of climate change has featured strongly in the European Union’s (EU) climate policy development since the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1995. The issue of climate change became more politicised over time, moving from a purely technical policy issue to an issue of high level politics. Research on the science-policy interface indicates that politicisation of an issue may make it more challenging for scientific expertise to enter and remain in the policymaking process. At the same time, research on the politicisation of climate change in particular argues that politicisation may be necessary to ensure climate policy action. Given these arguments, we should expect an evolution in the EU's knowledge exchange architecture for climate change over time.

This article provides an historical overview of the evolution of EU knowledge exchange architecture, processes or system for climate policy and action. By drawing on document analysis and an analysis of more than 30 interviews carried out between 2010 and 2022, we trace the evolution of the EU's knowledge exchange architecture for climate change, and identify both its formal and informal aspects. Covering an analytical period of nearly thirty years, we find that the formal aspects of the EU's knowledge exchange architecture evolved little over the course of time in terms of their structure and objectives, but that the quality of their use has varied. However, the informal aspects of the EU's knowledge exchange architecture have evolved greatly, with wide variety in degrees of openness to multi-disciplinary expert knowledge. We conclude by arguing that further research is required to explain the durability of the formal architecture and the variability of the informal aspects of the architecture, for example by drawing on theories of institutionalism for hypothesis development.

This paper investigates the polarisation of public opinion in Poland regarding the green transition within the European Green Deal. The study focuses on the narratives portraying the green transition. Using a citizen science project, online responses and comments, and a corpus of Polish and English language tweets and popular news media articles, the study employs sentiment analysis and polarisation indexes to compare and contrast professional media discourse with narratives on Polish Twitter reflecting lay citizens' voices. The keywords used to create the Twitter and news media articles databases are chosen based on the citizen science experiment conducted online. The Twitter database comprises more than 66,000 Polish and 30,000 English tweets. The analysis utilizes the "wheel of emotions" by Plutchik (1988) and the polarisation of sentiment indexes by Gawronska-Nowak, Lis, and Konieczna-Sałamatin (2021) to systematise the results. The research results provide a nuanced understanding of the discourse surrounding the green transition in Poland rather than relying on simplistic labels of polarisation. It shows the main cleavages of polarisation regarding the trust in science and expertise, as well as relates it to the more extensive debate on the rise of populism in the European Union.

References:

Gawrońska-Nowak, B., Lis, P., & Konieczna-Sałamatin, J. (2021). Trade Wins Or Trade Wars: The Perceptions and Knowledge in the Free Trade Debate. Springer Nature.

Plutchik, R. (1988). The nature of emotions: Clinical implications. In Emotions and psychopathology (pp. 1–20). Springer, Boston, MA.

Funding:

The publication has been supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under grant agreement No. 960366, project "ISEED - Inclusive Science and European Democracies."

Since the early 1990s and the debates around the formulation of the first European heritage program, Raphael, the link between heritage and environmental issues has been systematically made. Cultural heritage is a not-so-new card to be played for the European Union (EU) to address the twin climate and biodiversity emergencies. And while heritage is not part of the Green Deal, it is part of the broader sustainability agenda. By adopting a transversal vision of European public action, this paper questions the politicization of environmental issues in Europe and their formulation, especially on climate and biodiversity, through the prism of heritage.

First of all, heritage is a cultural practice used by civil society and cultural and political actors in the construction and regulation of a set of values at the European level. Those practices could be studied under two actions: naming and networking. In order to do so, actors employ different strategies, often symbolic, such as the "The 7 most endangered" program by Europa Nostra. It identifies endangered monuments and sites in Europe and subsequently mobilizes public, private, and cultural partners, taking advantage of the porous contours of culture and heritage and the actors around them.

Then, If the link between cultural heritage and climate change is visible in the work of some actors at the European level, one could nevertheless emphasize the absence of heritage in the European Green deal. Some organizations like Europa Nostra and International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), have taken the opposite view by publishing “The European Cultural Heritage Green Paper”. They want, through the publication of Green Paper or communication, to politicize the link between the two policies in order to protect heritage, the heart of their job, but also to legitimize themselves and find political and economic resources. However, Green Deal has direct impact on European heritage program Creative Europe, sustainability being a condition of funding for the selected projects. Moreover, the New Bauhaus includes cultural heritage to fulfill this project.

Thus, this paper seeks to approach cultural heritage and environmental policies from a double perspective: both as a sector of European public action and as a vector of solutions and good practices for environmental issues. Cultural actors frame heritage not only as a victim of climate change but as a potential provider of solutions to strengthen this policy.