Authors

Licia Cianetti¹;  ¹ University of Birmingham, UK

Discussion

Climate change mitigation policies are a crucial democratic battleground. In Europe, the EU’s Green Deal commits member states to implementing Territorial Just Transition Plans (TJTP) to decarbonise their economies. This paper focuses on Estonia’s TJTP as a window into how contestation around decarbonisation policies are reshaping democratic politics.
Estonia has some of the highest CO2 emissions per capita in the EU and one of its highest carbon intensities, due to its historical reliance on shale oil for energy production. Its TJTP, approved in 2022, commits it to phasing out shale oil use for electricity by 2035 and ceasing production from its mines by 2040. The mines are located in the north-eastern region (Ida-Virumaa), where a majority of residents belong to the Russian-speaking minority, and the shale oil industry provides among the best paid jobs in a context of higher-than-country-average unemployment. Climate assemblies and a permanent stakeholders’ platform were created to provide bottom-up policy input, at the same time as decarbonisation has become a crucial political battleground with the far-right party EKRE campaigning against it, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the EU's deprioritising of climate policies reshaped the calculus about energy transition. Finally, the Estonia’s state energy company Eesti Energia commits to net zero at home but is a world leader in oil shale technology, and exports this expertise internationally as part of its growth strategy; Estonia’s FDI-oriented economy also means that foreign investors are encouraged to tap into the “green energy transition” as a profit-making opportunity. Therefore, In Estonia as elsewhere, Decarbonisation policies are formulated and implemented amidst growing societal polarisation, unreconciled social divides, a growing far-right, increasing demands for participatory policymaking, and a maze of local, national and transnational interests and pressures. In turn, contestation around these policies reshapes those very cleavages, demands, and interests.
The interaction of these multiple, inter-scalar entanglements will shape how decarbonisation will happen on the ground, who will win or lose from it, and the political repercussions on Estonian democracy. This paper leverages Ida-Virumaa as a strategic site to investigate (a) the challenges that decarbonisation policies pose to democracy, intended as a space for self-governance and the articulation of popular demands, and (b) the opportunities it offers for democratic renewal – i.e., the expansion and empowerment of democratic spaces. In so doing, it proposes a new analytical approach that treats policy processes as inter-scalar rather than state-bound, and focuses specifically on how the entanglements between the local, the national, and the transnational shape contemporary democratic politics.