Political Ecology, Environmentalism and Greens in Central and Eastern Europe: Past, Present and Future Perspectives

This article provides a conceptual and historiographical overview of the recent developments in the literature on political environmentalism in Central and Eastern Europe, and outlines future perspectives. Not so long ago, the scholarly focus was firmly on the impact of enlargement and the engagement, compliance with EU policy, and the development of environmental NGOs in this regard. The contemporary outlook has drastically changed, however. The path to EU-membership is no longer topical, while the financial crisis has helped to undermine many of the certitudes regarding liberal institutions and democratic stability in the region. We argue that this changed environment demands a new conceptual and theoretical approach for considering green activism in these countries that extends beyond ‘transitology’, as Philipp Ther recently called it (Ther, 2016). We contend that the constraints shaping green activism in the region today must be viewed as an amalgam of domestic/local and global factors; the experience of late state socialism and the historical sociology of green activism in the communist and pre-communist periods are as relevant as Europeanization and the current shifts in political economic perspectives. Rather than assuming CEE states are still in need for ‘catching-up’, then, we posit that bottom-up development of green activism and environmental mobilisation in the region is effectively counteracted by such assumptions in various ways. In our view, contemporary green activism is better understood by concentrating on actual environmental issues, assessed in their local social embeddedness, and with the eye on broader shifts in global political economy regimes – for which we hope to build a strong case in this contribution.