Abstract

Transitioning to a decarbonized economy is a crucial part of climate change mitigation, with the phasing-out of coal, as the most significant source of carbon dioxide emissions, being the centerpiece of this effort. In the European context, the increasing pressures exerted especially on the basis of the European Union’s energy and climate policy, coupled with the inherent uncertainty of the transition process, encourage various struggles among the involved policy actors over the setting of specific transition pathways. One site of such contestation is media discourse, which may facilitate or limit policy change through agenda-setting, framing, and other processes. Importantly, discursive struggles also include industry incumbents, who have a vested interest in preserving the existing sociotechnical regime. This article focuses on the position of incumbents in terms of their relationship with governing political parties and the discursive strategies they employ. It explores the policy debate on coal mining expansion which took place in 2015 in the Czech Republic, a post-communist country with a coal-dependent economy, a skeptical position on energy transition, and a powerful energy industry. The research employs discourse network analysis to examine a corpus compiled from daily newspapers and applies block modeling techniques to analyze patterns of relationships within and between actor groups. The results show that incumbents successfully prevented policy change in the direction of rapid coal phase-out by exploiting discourse alignment with governing parties and efficiently employing discursive strategies based primarily on securitization of socioeconomic issues.

Highlights

  • Transition to a decarbonized economy is a crucial part of climate change mitigation efforts

  • The majority government was led by the Social Democrats and included two junior coalition partners, technocratic populist ANO 2011 and Christian Democrats

  • All within-group similarity values are statistically significantly higher indicating relative cohesiveness of the four actor groups. These results provide supportive evidence for the presence of two discourse coalitions with a low belief overlap led by the incumbents and environmental NGOs (ENGOs)

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Summary

Introduction

Transition to a decarbonized economy is a crucial part of climate change mitigation efforts. The study of political discourses is critical for better understanding energy transitions requiring major policy changes. We present a single-case study that examines (1) whether energy industry incumbents, i.e., actors that benefit most from the prevailing system (Smink, 2015), aligned with governing political parties, and (2) what discursive strategies incumbents employed to prevent policy outcomes from facilitating coal phaseout (Johnstone et al, 2017). By linking policy process (Leifeld, 2016; Sabatier, 1988) and energy transition literatures (Geels, 2002; Johnstone et al, 2017), it explores the role of incumbents in preventing transition-oriented policy change through discursive interactions. The research brings novel empirical evidence on a major European coal consumer which is neither committed to a specific phase-out pathway (such as Germany), nor actively opposing that policy option (such as Poland; see Lehotský, Černoch, Osička, & Ocelík, 2019; Osička et al, 2020)

Theory: A Discursive Layer of Energy Transition
Data and Methods
Results
Residual group
Incumbents’ Discursive Strategies
Discussion and Conclusions
Full Text
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