Exploring the Presence and Absence of Academic Discourse on Public Participation in the European Green Deal: A Central and Eastern European Perspective

The European Green Deal (EGD), a complex policy program meant to address climate change and ensure a “just, fair and inclusive” transition into a more sustainable and greener Europe, was launched by the EU in 2019. It was clear from the very beginning that the opportunities and costs of the ambitious green transition would be very uneven geographically, not only within the EU but also among its regions and locations. Regions with higher environmental stress and/or less technological and economic capacities will inevitably be disadvantaged. The EGD requires large-scale public acceptance, which comes with democratic innovations and participative practices, which are less embedded in many regions. The former socialist bloc still struggles today with establishing decent levels of public participation, as well as with adopting and implementing democratic community principles in practice. The main aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, we intend to give an assessment of where Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries stand in the process of the green transition and what the major focus areas affecting them are, based on the existing academic literature. On the other hand, we intend to give a clear overview of the causes for and aspects of the weakness of civil society in the post-communist bloc and reasons why the adaptation of democratic innovations is lagging in this region. For this purpose, a systematic literature search and bibliometric analysis was performed based on articles indexed in the Scopus and Web of Science databases. Altogether, 172 articles published in the region were filtered and systematically analyzed according to the main themes of the papers related to the EGD. Research findings show that the interests of researchers in CEE countries largely differ from those in the mainstream academic discourse. Research topics, high on the agenda in Western countries, are hardly present in the academic discourse in CEE countries. On the other hand, issues like energy efficiency, urbanization’s impacts on green growth and renewable energy development, and innovations towards a circular economy dominate the research agenda. This region started the green transition process with major handicaps compared to the West, connected to path dependency and the legacy of socialist structures. The paper analyses the bibliometric aspects of articles published on these topics and highlights the highly sectoral and country-focused approaches taken with regard to the EGD. In our paper, we highlight the importance of the region on a geographic scale, which goes beyond the initial framework and offers a different approach to addressing the issue. The paper proves that the presence of EGD-related participation processes is significantly lacking in academic literature in the CEE region. However, the most important finding of our paper is the identification of an academic gap regarding democratic innovations and deliberation, as well as regarding active involvement and participation of people in EGD-related programs. This gives an even more important base for the assessment of the region in terms of the EGD, which faces growing populism and advancing authoritarian regimes, such that public participation and citizen control have become vitally important for the implementation of the green transition.