While political environmentalism played an important role in social mobilization against communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe before 1989, throughout the 1990s and early 2000s conservationism appeared to be in decline across the region, and external pressure from European institutions and Western donors influenced environmental policy. What explains the effectiveness of protest since the environmental movement emerged in the 1980s? We trace the emergence and evolution of Polish political environmentalism, looking at three levels of the environmental movement’s legitimacy: the level of practices, societal support, and discourse. Each phase identified between 1980s and 2017 saw shifts on different levels of legitimacy, and each ended with a spectacular environmental protest or a decision, bearing implications for the following phase. Since 2010, we see a deep polarization of Polish politics, limiting the effectiveness of environmental protest despite the movement’s regained triple legitimacy in large parts of the society.

The scale of food waste across Europe is alarming, and its reduction has recently been identified as an important public policy issue. However, effective solutions require initiative and action both from the government and the food industry. What are the drivers of industry self‐regulation in this area? We provide an in‐depth analysis of the emergence and evolution of Norway's food waste reduction governance. In 2017, food sector companies signed a Voluntary Industry Agreement on food waste reduction, but as of 2021, a shift towards a binding law is increasingly likely. With outcome‐explaining process tracing, we test three hypotheses, identifying causal factors and mechanisms that explain the emergence of the Agreement, and apply a typology of (self‐)regulation to show how different actors and mechanisms played an important role in different phases of the process. We find that, initially, food waste reduction governance was clearly industry‐led. However, societal and political pressure was necessary for institutionalizing self‐regulation and its timing. We also note that despite Norway's tradition for co‐regulation, in the wake of the Agreement, lawmakers continued to pressure the government for a binding law, with a clear move from initial industry self‐regulation towards state‐steered regulation.

The paper looks at the case of a large and widely publicised environmental controversy in Poland, and asks why the authorities chose the “pro-environmental” option in the end. Taking into account the wider political and social context of the controversy, we also try to show what the role of the European Union (EU) was in that conflict. We adopt a rhetorical approach to show the discursive struggle around the environmental protection norms, as well as the idea of participation. We engage in a theoretical discussion with constructivist research on normative change, arguing for the need to take domestic agency, as well as local ideational structures, into account while also questioning the usefulness of the concept of “socialisation” and the notion of “norm diffusion” in the debate on Europeanisation. Instead, normative change could be perceived as the empowerment and legitimisation of certain norms and values at the cost of a relative de-legitimisation of others. The EU, apart from its legal impact, can be seen as an important reference point, both as a source of powerful discourses and of legitimacy, while the agency is mostly on the domestic side. We contend, however, that such normative shifts are very context dependent and unstable.

Bioenergy, mostly from wood biomass, is now widely seen as an important element in the efforts to tame dangerous climate change. At the same time, foresters and development specialists note that wood-based energy production can contribute to rural development. However, to deliver on these two goals without generating negative side effects, wood-based energy has to be sustainable, while currently, the sector is developing rapidly in ways that are technologically advanced, with questionable sustainability. How can sustainability be achieved in bioenergy production, to make it a viable element of climate change mitigation, adaptation, and rural development? Arguing for the need to mainstream sustainability thinking into wood-based energy production, the article draws on a critical literature review to identify four different levels of sustainability in the existing research on bioenergy from wood. It shows two possible strategies for integrating sustainability in wood bioenergy production. A top-down approach draws on global forestry governance instruments, while a bottom-up approach uses best-practices in forest plantations for bioenergy purposes, as illustrated by a case study from rural Paraguay. Using aggregated and visualized sustainability indicators, the article exemplifies what sustainable bioenergy production means in more tangible terms.