Cross-Border Coal Conflicts: Examining Claim-Making Dynamics in the Turow Lignite Mine Dispute

The future of coal production and consumption is central to efforts to mitigate anthropogenic global warming. Rapid coal phase-outs in consuming countries are essential (Johnson et al. 2015, Jewell et al. 2019). However, attempts to alter the status quo—whether to extend mining or terminate it—often face fierce opposition, sparking political conflict. Pro-coal actors emphasize benefits like jobs, affordable energy, and energy security, while opponents stress the climatic and environmental harms of continued combustion. Governance in this domain is both peculiar and contested. Yet, mining conflicts are typically confined to a single nation-state, even though international actors might participate. Still, actors operate within one jurisdiction and legal framework, providing various avenues for engagement in institutional and non-institutional politics within one single framework. However, what happens when the conflict happens to be interstate? We examine a recent case of lignite mining extension at Poland's Turow opencast mine complex, situated at the tripoint of Poland, Czechia, and Germany—three major EU coal consumers. While Turow's power plant emits CO2, the mine depletes groundwater in all three countries. Poland's decision to operate the mine until 2044 and a rushed 6-year license extension issued in 2020 led to a legal battle when Czechia brought the case to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in February 2021. Poland sought to preserve mining, supported by mining unions and complex workers, alluding towards necessity of a just and orderly transition (cf. Stevis 2015, Cernoch et al. 2024). Czech local opposition and NGOs actively opposed the extension, calling it unjust from both environmental and climate perspective (cf. Ciplet 2019, 2021). Unlike in past domestic conflicts over coal mining (Cernoch et al. 2019, Ocelik et al. 2019), Czech government aligned itself with the movement and ultimately brought the case to the ECJ (Cernoch et al., forthcoming). We assume the observed dynamics is mostly caused by more limited opportunities of Czech actors to participate in the governance of Polish mining activities. Given that, we want to explore specifically how actors constructed the issue in the public domain, justifying the necessity to address the mining issue. I.e., we are interested in actors, claims these actors make, and how their claim-making evolves over time. We use discourse network analysis (Leifeld and Haunss 2012, Leifeld 2013), which operationalizes actors’ claim-making as a two-mode network and is particularly suitable to investigate the claim-making over time. We use 394 media articles published between 2021 and 2022 to extract networks, as these are assumed to be suitable for the temporal development (cf. Leifeld 2013).