Green conservatism or environmental nativism?: Exploring carbon dependency as populist political strategy in Poland

The paper aims at describing and explaining the carbon-dependency political strategy in climate-energy policies as an exemplary case of populist politics in Poland. Under the slogan of green conservatism, the nativist Polish governments led by PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwośc/Law and Justice) pursue climate-energy policies of environmental irresponsibility. The inertia in the Polish climate-energy policy creates one of the most dangerous mixes of populist politics and the (state) organized environmental hypocrisy. Explaining the gap emerging between the globally agreed goals and domestic policy delivery failure (and the dynamics in which it is created) allows us understand the factors determining policy output that are highly undesirable from the point of view of the ambitious global sustainability goals. Theoretically, the analysis is informed by the mainstream political science discourses focused on nativism and populism. Their explanatory and interpretative potentials offer some analytical lenses featuring the populist political strategy carried out by the Polish government in the climate-energy domain. It also shows the peculiar case of the European integration differentiation in one of the most strategic policy domains of the European Union.