Women constitute an essential yet underexplored pillar of a just energy transition, particularly through their contributions to social, educational, and cultural domains that mitigate depopulation, economic stagnation, and territorial abandonment in coal regions. This comparative study investigates women's multifaceted roles in advancing a just transition in two lignite-dependent regions, namely Eastern Greater Poland (Poland) and Lusatia (Germany), while also examining the opportunities and barriers they encounter. Grounded in feminist ecological economics and feminist political ecology, the analysis addresses two core questions: (1) What roles do women assume in the energy transition? and (2) What benefits can they derive from it? Drawing on 50 semi-structured interviews (2023–2025) and field observations in both regions, the study highlights women's leadership in advocacy, industry representation, grassroots mobilization, and often-overlooked administrative functions. The findings identify women as pivotal agents of change: in Poland, they secured Just Transition Fund resources and co-developed the ‘Job After Coal’ programme, supporting 2200 individuals, including miners' families; in Lusatia, women's networks advance socio-ecological demands amid right-wing resistance. By providing empirical evidence of women's leadership in European coal regions, thus addressing a gap identified in a literature review, this study enriches understanding of gender dynamics in energy transitions.

This study investigates the rapid expansion of photovoltaic (PV) investments in Poland from 2015 to 2024, comparing the development of the PV market with other renewable energy technologies. Drawing on secondary data from the Energy Regulatory Office, Statistics Poland, and Eurostat, alongside primary research, the analysis identifies key drivers of this growth. Primary data include a consumer and prosumer survey conducted in 2021 and 2024, and annual performance observations of a 4.4 kW PV micro-installation in central Poland to estimate return on investment (ROI). Findings confirm that the PV sector is the fastest-growing segment of Poland's renewable energy market, primarily driven by government subsidies co-funded by the European Union. Rising energy prices and the financial viability of PV micro-installations are primary motivators for adoption. Additionally, survey respondents highlighted environmental quality improvements and the welfare of future generations as significant factors. This study underscores the interplay of economic, policy, and societal drivers in shaping Poland's PV market boom.

Summary The concept of a forest transition – a regional shift from deforestation to forest recovery – tends to equate forest area expansion with sustainability, assuming that more forest is good for people and the environment. To promote debate and more just and ecologically sustainable outcomes during this period of intense focus on forests (such as the United Nations’ Decade on Ecological Restoration, the Trillion Trees initiative and at the United Nations’ Climate Change Conferences), we synthesize recent nuanced and integrated research to inform forest management and restoration in the future. Our results reveal nine pitfalls to assuming forest transitions and sustainability are automatically linked. The pitfalls are as follows: (1) fixating on forest quantity instead of quality; (2) masking local diversity with large-scale trends; (3) expecting U-shaped temporal trends of forest change; (4) failing to account for irreversibility; (5) framing categories and concepts as universal/neutral; (6) diverting attention from the simplification of forestlands into single-purpose conservation forests or intensive production lands; (7) neglecting social power transitions and dispossessions; (8) neglecting productivism as the hidden driving force; and (9) ignoring local agency and sentiments. We develop and illustrate these pitfalls with local- and national-level evidence from Southeast Asia and outline forward-looking recommendations for research and policy to address them. Forest transition research that neglects these pitfalls risks legitimizing unsustainable and unjust policies and programmes of forest restoration or tree planting.

Energy cooperatives are witnessing substantial growth across the European Union. However, despite the desire to be inclusive and to foster diversity, the representation of women in energy cooperatives is still limited. The study aimed to verify the strength of the endorsement of gender stereotypes within energy cooperatives and, in the case of women, the factors stereotypes are associated to. Data were collected in two cooperatives, ènostra in Italy and Ecopower in Belgium, for a total of 5690 respondents. Apart from being among the most important cooperatives in their respective countries, the two represent an interesting comparative case because in ènostra women and men are almost equally represented and the president is a woman, while in Ecopower women are underrepresented and the board of directors is male-dominated. For both cooperatives, the results suggested that women had lower self-assessment of knowledge about energy than men and that they recognised, more so than men, the importance of the presence of women on the board of directors (BoD). Finally, we found that women with stronger gender stereotypes about energy exhibited lower self-assessment of knowledge but a greater tendency to increase it after joining the cooperative and they attributed slightly more importance to the presence of women on the cooperative BoD.

We are drowning in a sea of plastic. Not only do marine animals ingest or get entangled in (micro) plastic, but it also ends up in the food chain, including in humans. This plastic comes from mainly single-use products. "Directive (EU) 2019/904 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 5 June 2019 on the reduction of the impact of certain plastic products on the environment" introduced numerous restrictions on their production. However, its effectiveness depends on national implementations that are delayed due to, inter alia, the objections of manufacturers. In this article, we present research conducted on Polish companies producing single-use plastic products, on sellers (retail outlets and food service establishments) and consumers. The results show that all study groups agree on the need to reduce the production of disposable plastics. The most frequently indicated solution is the introduction of reusable products to the market (in line with the circular economy notion), which would still be synthetic polymers. Manufacturers emphasize that promising chemical recycling technologies are emerging for all plastic waste. In addition, both consumers and producers are increasingly focused on products made of alternative materials, as consumers (especially from large cities) are increasingly averse to plastic in general, which was also pointed out by sellers. Consumers surveyed believe that the "Plastics Directive" is needed and blame the producers of disposable plastics for the condition of the environment, while manufacturers highlight irresponsible consumer behaviour and the need for more education in this regard.

The term of “normality” – we use in the title – stems from a discourse that (re)emerged at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, governing people’s imaginaries and beliefs that “back to normal life” or “better normal” will happen. Escalation of a war in Ukraine and concatenated environmental, energy and economic crises have dissuaded us from these views, showing rather that uncertainty will become the new reality in which we will live. In the paper we combine approaches from social sciences (the concept of social practice) and humanities (speculative fiction as a practice) to show how normative understanding of “normality” prevents discursive progressing beyond the capitalist logic of “normal” and how it immobilises transformation of everyday social practices into the practices that inscribe uncertainty as a normal. As we argue, to exceed foregoing imaginations of “normality” we should employ speculative fictions as realms that help people experiment and exercise different scenarios of the futures. Since the authors represent four disciplines and work in a society where disciplinary boundaries are well established, this paper reflects our hand-on experience with building a transdisciplinary approach.

The involvement of women in the organization and functioning of voluntary self-help groups and their activity in the forums of these groups on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic is surprisingly high. In Poland, the share of women involved in the "visible hand" groups was 80 percent. This article is based on the theoretical considerations of solidarity and mutual aid and points to the nexus of women and urban commons. It also presents the results of empirical research, based on mixed methods, devoted to the motivations of members to join affinity groups of this kind in the era of the pandemic as well as their expectations and the perceived benefits and dangers/threats. The obtained results contradict the stereotypical assumption that the high level of participation of women in self-help groups is related to the reproductive work they perform and the most important motivation for them is community building. There is also a finding related to women's agency, namely that all contemporary social movements mobilize a greater percentage of women. The members of the affinity groups surveyed see numerous benefits from their actions, both for others and for themselves (especially in psychological and social dimensions), and the most frequently indicated danger is dishonesty. The results of this research are an important contribution to both the theories of urban commons and informal organization of care. At the same time, the presented analysis of groups and their emotions, needs and calls for action may serve as an inspiration for both international comparative research and the very communities that are stuck up in crises (both current and those yet to come).

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At present, as energy security has become one of the highest priorities discussed globally, swift social, ecological and economic changes in the energy market are taking place. In many countries, local cooperatives have been established that intend, among other goals, to purchase power grids and increase renewable energy production. This paper presents the outcomes of a research project devoted to one specific case - BurgerEnergie Berlin (BEB). This cooperative, which is bidding for a twenty-year concession to the Berlin power grid (the biggest in Germany), intends to modernise it after the purchase in order to change it into a smart grid and enable a number of local renewable sources to connect to it. A key success factors model for this cooperative - based on field studies and the use of inductive reasoning - is the original contribution to existing research on energy cooperatives. The presented qualitative analysis, taking into account the details of the process of bidding for the concession, can be an inspiration to cooperative researchers and practitioners and a contribution to a future discussion on alternative solutions to the issues of public utilities ownership and their management.

The European electricity market and energy security have recently become heatedly discussed topics at the European Union level. In many countries, political and financial support for the transition towards renewable energy systems during the last two decades have encouraged the establishment of a substantial number of new electricity cooperatives. Cooperatives, as social enterprises, demonstrate attachment to values such as equity and equality in their actions, thus they might be perceived as women-friendly entities. However, little empirical research on that topic has been carried out in the European Union so far. The pilot study presented in this paper fills this gap by determining if gender perspective is reflected in the European electricity cooperatives’ declarations and actions and whether this perspective is related to cooperative size, adopted mode of governance and cultural determinants of the region/country. This paper shows why gender equality is valuable to electricity cooperatives and how the presented research results may be useful to practitioners, researchers and policy makers.

Direct democracy, the tradition of which dates back to ancient Athens, is now widely practised in many countries around the world. In this paper, a case study of participatory budgeting is given as an illustration of how residents can decide directly about their common resources. The paper is theoretical in nature. It aims to present a model of institutional analysis of direct democracy phenomena based on the example of participatory budgets analysis, taking into account variables related to two novel approaches: Varieties of Capitalism and intersectionality. This model can be used for diagnosing aspects of local democracy, comparative studies of participatory budgeting processes taking place in various countries around the world, as well as for further research into other processes of direct democracy, thus contributing to the development of knowledge in this field and to social sciences in general.

For decades, economic theories have been changing due to historical events and economic turbulences, yet each time they have had an actual impact on the lives of societies. Today, when neo-liberal theories are no longer appreciated, the divide between the richest and the poorest members of society is growing almost exponentially, and technological development drastically changes working conditions, new visions of a future economy are needed – ones in which everyone can find their place and live a life worth living. My suggestion is that this economy should be based on the ethics of care – a line of argument presented in this article. It opens with an outline of the ongoing economic changes. There then follows an explanation of the importance of ethics of care, as well as of the care necessary for the development and reproduction of societies, as the main framework for further consideration of job guarantee and unconditional basic income, to which the subsequent sections of the article are devoted. The analysis of these theories from a feminist perspective will also be enriched with proposals for additional solutions that go beyond the current paradigm of growth.

The purpose of this research is to analyze the process of (re)constitution of urban commons by actors involved in action situations. What follows is a description of the way in which these actors are organized and (re)claim urban space, asserting their rights to the city, in relation to the introduced framework. For my analysis of two initiatives in Poland I propose the approach of Elinor Ostrom and address its limitations and critiques as well as outline further areas of research.

This paper concentrates on the scientific work of Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012), who for more than forty years carried out theoretical and empirical research on common-pool resources. Ostrom theorizes that the commons often prevent resource exhaustion more effectively than the state, international institutions, or private owners. However, one of the foundations of commons, as an alternative program to the private/state dualism, ought to be the principle of equality that includes a gender perspective in theory and practice. The goal of this article is to provide thoughtful ways of incorporating gender in economic research from the viewpoint of feminist epistemology and to indicate the place of gender in Ostrom's work. The methodology of this study could be used for reading economic publications through a gender perspective as well as for inspiring economists to use both gender as a category of analysis and gender-sensitive language in their theoretical and empirical studies.

People of communities, local societies or collectives work together to manage common-pooled resources (commons) without an external authority by combining multiple knowledge sources and ways of functioning. Since gender relations affect planning, production, well-being, and many other aspects of life, an in-depth look into the assumptions about commons might help avoid bias and distortion in disciplinary accounts. This theoretical paper aims to present various ways and methods of including gender in the institutional analysis of communities and their actions related to the governing of commons. Therefore, it challenges gender relations within communities and introduces the meaning of socially-constructed institutions in the governing of common resources. Further, relying on my framework of institutional analysis and the given examples, I address the necessity of the inclusion of gender-centred perspective in deliberations on commons. This part provides a unique contribution to the studies on that subject. The main conclusion of this analysis is the need for a critical reflection of researchers, non-governmental organisations and members of communities on their institutions which can enhance or combat inequalities, thereby significantly impacting the achieved results.