Tracing a caring transition policy for the German coal region Lusatia

The room is roaring with applause as spoken-word artist Jessy James LaFleur has just finished her performance speaking to the sentiment many women feel here in this region: being fed up and tired of the sexism in everyday life and local politics, worrying about the growing right-wing movement but still being fired up to fight. The event–a conference¹ organized by the alliance of municipal Equal Opportunity Officers in the coal region of Lusatia in eastern Germany–is bound to be a major success: With about a hundred and twenty people in attendance, it is on this day in September 2022 that the careful network building of local women demanding their voices to be heard in the transition process culminates. The unique women’s alliances that have formed in Lusatia to influence regional transition and the allocation of transition funds have inspired us to analyze transition policy from a distinctly feminist point of view. The alliances put the interests of women in the transition in the foreground, arguing inter alia for upgrading of paid and unpaid care work, which is still largely done by women.

Lusatia is one of three active lignite (brown coal) mining regions in Germany and extends on the German side across the south of the federal state of Brandenburg and the east of Saxony. Lusatia differs from the other two coal regions in that the coal industry played a particularly strong role in the regional economy (Stognief et al. 2019; Walk and Stognief 2021). Lignite has been mined and burned industrially in the region for about 100 years, creating value and jobs but also severe adverse effects on ecosystems such as climate, air quality, water, soils, and wildlife (Krümmelbein et al. 2012; Müller 2017). Following the German reunification, large parts of the industries of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) were dismantled, also affecting the coal industry in Lusatia (cf. Ragnitz et al. 2022). The number of direct employees in the lignite industry decreased from 79.016 in 1989 to 7.362 in 2021.² This ongoing transition is affecting Lusatia, as the structurally weak region has been struggling with the problem of increasing emigration since reunification and young people in particular are leaving the region. Between 1995 and 2015, 18 per cent of the population left the region (Schwartzkopff and Schulz 2015, p. 7). While the coal industry, which has always played an important role in the region’s identity, is now coming to an end, none of the newly emerging economic sectors can develop the economic and identity-creating potential to replace it. In Germany, the legal deadline for phasing out lignite is 2038 (with the possibility of bringing it forward to 2035).³ However, the coalition agreement of the current ruling coalition states that the phase-out should be completed in 2030 if possible. While the phase-out is urgently needed for the protection of the global climate and regional ecosystems, socio-economic considerations of the regions are key for a successful and just transition. Therefore, 40 billion euros are being provided for the German coal regions to shape the regional transition⁴ process, 17.2 billion of which are allotted to Lusatia alone.⁵ The amount of money that has been made available to the regions in Germany to shape the coal phase-out makes it a unique case internationally (Furnaro 2023). In our paper, we have investigated which ideas of a successful transition influence the allocation of these funds. We examined these dominant ideas from a distinctive feminist and care theoretical perspective, a viewpoint that has so far been rarely taken in the context of coal transitions and is therefore a valuable contribution to understanding of the transition from a sustainability nexus perspective.

Viewing the regional transition through a care lens means trying to find practical answers to the difficult questions of how to conduct societal change in a just and caring way. Care work that is associated with femininity tends to be overlooked in patriarchal societies (Tronto 2013). Therefore, our research focuses on the state of economic sectors which are predominantly occupied by women in the prevailing regional transition discourse, such as the health sector, education, or daycare. We made particular use of Hall’s (2020, p. 1) concept of “social reproduction as social infrastructure”. It describes that social infrastructure, i.e., the structure of social connections that is essential for the survival of a community, must be maintained through constant care work (in the sense of e.g. maintaining relationships, childcare, education, and healthcare). We consider social infrastructure to be an important part of the so-called soft location factors (Masch 2022). We contribute to spelling out in concrete terms what social infrastructure encompasses.

We used critical discourse analysis to study the policy discourse on the regional transition in Lusatia (Fairclough 2013; Jäger 2015; Jäger and Maier 2016). We analyzed relevant policy documents that guide transition policy. We contrasted this analysis with data from semi-structured interviews with 16 politically active women in Lusatia as well as one focus group with 3 women who work in caring professions. Our research questions were:

Our research builds on a lively international debate on the design of gender-just transitions (cf. Bell et al. 2020; Lieu et al. 2020; Wolfram and Kienesberger 2023; Walk 2024). In our view, the debate focuses strongly on how the upscaling of renewable energies can be gender-equitable (cf. Johnson et al. 2020). With few exceptions, there is little research so far on what aspects need to be considered from a feminist perspective when phasing out fossil fuels in affected regions (Walk et al. 2021; Lahiri-Dutt et al. 2022; Braunger and Walk 2022; Nayak and Swain 2023; Humphries and Thomas 2023).

With our work, we make female-associated care work visible as an important part of social infrastructure (re)building in a region undergoing a sustainability transition. We soon found that a simplistic criticism of masculinist patriarchal patterns in policymaking does not suffice for a deeper understanding of the issues at hand. Rather, as our investigations progressed, we have identified a care-oriented view of the transition where meeting the elementary needs of people is the foundation of economic thinking. In official policy documents concepts related to social reproduction were rarely mentioned and remain largely undefined and empty. Our key contribution, based on our theoretical considerations and empirical material, is the development of four pillars of care work as social infrastructure pertaining to coal regions in transition: (1) aftercare for social and ecological residuals of coal mining, (2) social cohesion, (3) democratic care services, and (4) caring democracy: democratic decision-making on how to care.

In the European descended patriarchal thinking tradition care work is usually considered as direct care to children and the elderly as well as housework. It is culturally assigned as women’s work. This assignment does not only lead to an unequal distribution of care work within households but also to a highly sex-segregated workforce. Those to whom this work is attributed–women in general or professional carers who are not paid at all or are poorly paid–are moralized as “natural” carers and therefore also constantly criticized for not caring “enough” or for having lost their “natural” ability to care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). In this binary norm, being considered male means to be given a “pass” out of thinking about care work that is assigned to women and girls. We follow Tronto (2013) in her argument that work in protection (such as in the police or military) and production (e.g., in industry) can be understood as care work associated with masculinity. For example, Allen’s (2022) case study of the Upper Silesia coal mining region in Poland describes how the loving care that men provide for their families by producing heat from coal ovens is entangled with their masculinity and identity as coal miners.

Yet, our work focuses on forms of care⁶ that are associated with femininity. This care is thought of as confined to the privacy of family houses despite being essential in every area of society. However, it is structurally devalued and considered to be in opposition to virtues that neoliberal societies hold in high regard, such as accomplishment, autonomy, and rationality (Tronto 1993).

A particular part of care work that is very relevant to the argument we develop regarding the political struggle of women’s networks in Lusatia is captured in Tronto’s (2013) concept of caring with: assigning responsibilities for care. She argues that debate on how to organize care (caring with) should be at the heart of democratic societies. Care is a public value and involves public practices. In a “caring democracy”, people have an equal say about an acceptable way to share caring responsibilities (Tronto 2013). We apply Tronto’s and Fisher’s broad definition of care which also includes caring for nonhumans: “On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Fisher and Tronto 1991, cited in Tronto 2013, 103).

Based on Tronto’s work, Gottschlich and Katz (2020a, 2020b) develop the notion of Caring with nature/s. Nature/s are understood as independent, self-regenerating, and potent subjects with which humans are indispensably interwoven. Caring with nature/s means recognizing the relationality of all human and nonhuman worlds (despite their manifold differences) due to their vulnerability and transience, as well as their fundamental interdependence. Caring with nature/s, meaning dealing with the theoretical foundations and the practical and political preconditions of care, is–as caring with in relation to other humans–an indispensable social necessity (Gottschlich and Katz 2020a). The relationship between humans and the nonhuman world is characterized by human appropriation and exploitation of nonhumans (Gottschlich and Hackfort 2022). The current ecological, economic, and political crisis can be described as a product of capitalist society actively undermining its ability to, in Tronto’s terms, “maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’” (1993, p. 103; Heilmann and Scholz 2018; Fraser 2021).

To define aftercare for ecological residuals of coal mining, we build on the Society of Ecological Restoration (SER) standards for a baseline understanding of “restorative activities” divided into four categories: (1) reducing negative impacts on social and–ecological systems, (2) remediation as the removal or containment of toxic or hazardous materials and other threats, (3) basic rehabilitation of a severely altered ecosystem, and (4) ecological restoration to a past “trajectory” (Nelson et al. 2024). There is a lively scholarly debate around these terms (Lima et al. 2016; Gerwing et al. 2022; Nelson et al. 2024), and we agree with Beckett (2021) that the still lingering narrative of return to a past ecological and social state in many of these definitions is problematic and tends to obscure past and ongoing injustices. In the case of Lusatia, this becomes especially apparent looking at the perpetuity of altered hydrology and impaired water quality. Therefore, we choose to apply Beckett and Keeling’s (2019) notion of restorative activities as care work. They emphasize that restorative activities are not just about “cleaning up” and removing hazardous waste, but also about perpetual care for the people, social and ecological relations, and wildlife that have been hurt or damaged by a mine. There is a need for care to heal these open wounds, including “memory-work and a place-based ethics of care” (Till 2012, p. 1). This work of mourning can nourish collectivity and can open up the imagination towards more just futures (Till 2012). Folkers (2021) shows how fossil materialities persist through time using the term residuals. In reference to Nelson et al. (2024), we use the term ecological residuals to include everything that is in need of ecological restorative activities in the sense defined above.

The major concept in the policymaking of the Federal Republic of Germany connected to care work is “Daseinsvorsorge” (public service, literally “existence provision”). The concept originated in the right-wing German academics pondering infrastructure planning in preparation for the second world war (Folkers 2017). The care (“Sorge”) aspect of public services in the tradition of the German welfare state rest in parts upon the Christian concept of “caritas”, invoking an authoritarian pastor caring for his community like a herder for his sheep (Folkers 2020). At present, some social movements in Germany are trying to redefine the concept of “Daseinsvorsorge” in a progressive manner but given its authoritarian history, we have deliberately chosen to make use of the term "social infrastructure" instead. We only use the term “Daseinsvorsorge” when we quote our interviewees.

“Infrastructure” is the background structure–from the Latin prefix infra (“below”)–that makes social, economic, cultural, and political life happen. Correspondingly, a basic understanding of social infrastructure is “networks of spaces, facilities, institutions, and groups that create affordances for social connection” that are crucial to making social life possible (Latham and Layton 2019, p. 3). The concept of social infrastructure makes visible the places of encounter and essential activities for social cohesion, which are often invisible and devalued in the debate about public space. We understand the pivotal concept of social cohesion as having three essential features as Schiefer and van der Noll (2017, p. 17) have distilled from decades of scholarly debate: “(1) the quality of social relations (including social networks, trust, acceptance of diversity, and participation), (2) identification with the social entity, and (3) orientation towards the common good (sense of responsibility, solidarity, compliance to social order).” The notion of social infrastructure is not only increasingly used among scholars but also in policymaking, especially in urban planning (Hall 2020).

Hall (2020) criticizes these conceptions of social infrastructure as being too abbreviated and too focused on the construction of specific places and buildings as it lacks consideration of the essential reproductive work in communities such as childcare, education, and healthcare (paid and unpaid). She argues that the intimacy and associated emotional care work that is necessary to hold up, for example, a friendship, a family, or a civil society organization is a crucial part of social infrastructure. She, therefore, argues for the importance of treating “social reproduction as social infrastructure” (Hall 2020, 1). Given how the terms care and social reproduction are similarly characterized around the maintenance of (life) worlds in Tronto (2013)and Hall (2020), we argue to put them into conversation towards a notion of care as social infrastructure.

The role of care work as social infrastructure becomes particularly visible when it is being reduced or discontinued, for example in times of austerity (Pearson and Elson 2015). In short, people constantly reproduce infrastructure. They actively participate in the production of structures that enable and sustain life in a city or region (Schilliger 2022). Investing in social reproduction as social infrastructure means including care work in economic analysis and policy (Hall 2020). Our paper contributes to this by showing which types of care work are relevant in the regional transition (and as such are part of social infrastructure) and how they can be strengthened and made more visible.

Following Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), we use the concept of care as an analytic tool to ask “how to care?” in the context of the regional transition rather than as a description of a predetermined collection of practices. Our ambition is therefore not to remain criticizing but to go a step further and highlight local women’s answers to the complex questions of how to conduct a societal transition.

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) provides the methodological framework for our analysis. Discourses can be defined as flows of knowledge through time and space. They institutionalize and regulate how people think, talk, and act and thereby contribute to the structuring of power and domination relations (Jäger 2015; Jäger and Maier 2016). Even though no individual or group can determine the discourse, power relations have a decisive influence on which of the many constructions of the world are socially most efficacious (Fairclough 2013). CDA shows what is to be considered normal and not normal in a certain historical and geographical context, what is considered sayable, rational, and beyond all doubt (Jäger 2015, Jäger and Maier 2016). The establishing and maintaining of normality is done by constant repetition of certain themes which constitute a kind of uniformity also between different discourses. In reference to discourses that are dominated by this uniformity one can speak of hegemony (Jäger 2015). Claims to truth dominant in a discourse that appear as common sense or objective are in a Gramscian sense hegemonic if there seems to be no alternative way of thinking (Wodak and Meyer 2016). However, in reference to Folkers (2021), we choose to adapt Gramsci’s notion of hegemony analogous to Williams (1977, pp. 121–127), who argues that rather than constituting a hegemonic historical block, what is dominant is always challenged by the emerging and influenced by residual history. In Folkers’ (2021, p. 2) words, “Residual, dominant, and emergent are therefore not simply past, present, and future, but instances of a complex and conflictual now.” A contribution of CDA can be to make visible the counter-discourses to hegemonic discourses and corresponding strategies for change and new imaginaries (Fairclough 2013). The critical agenda of CDA fits into a feminist research framework as it explores how power and dominance are produced in patriarchal societies and how they can be dissolved, while disadvantaged groups are being empowered or able to empower themselves (Lazar 2007; Bell et al. 2020).

In the spirit of a feminist research agenda, we would like to put the demands and needs of otherwise little-heard and underrepresented people in regional transition policies first. In our case, this is the Lusatian women’s network. We compared their views and demands with the views found in the dominant discourse. To capture the dominant discourse, we analyzed three key policy documents pertaining to the regional transition: the mission statement (Leitbild) in the federal Structural Support Act (“Strukturstärkungsgesetz”, SSG), the “Action Program” (“Handlungsprogramm”, HPS) in Saxony, and the “Lusatia Program” (“Lausitzprogramm”, LPB) in Brandenburg.⁷ The latter two are the policy guidelines of the federal states, Brandenburg and Saxony, that the region Lusatia is part of. Each federal state was required to define a procedure for awarding and using the financial aid provided by the Coal Regions Investment Act (InvKG), which is part of the SSG. The resulting HPS and the LPB themselves are therefore not legally binding to the extent that the SSG is, but they were nonetheless written to operationalize the requirements from the SSG in their respective jurisdictions, that is, providing a framework for the allocation of public funds intended for supporting the transition away from coal. They each contain a description of the initial situation and the potential of the region from the perspective of the federal states, as well as strategic goals and fields of action, and describe the management and implementation process. As such, they reflect the viewpoint of the state governments and administrations who oversee regional transition policy and its implementation. Alongside the SSG’s mission statement,⁸ we therefore consider the contents of these policy documents to adequately represent the dominant transition discourse in Lusatia.

We aimed to examine the extent to which a potential counter-discourse to the ideas in the policy documents is developed in the women’s network in Lusatia. Part of the network is the organization “F wie Kraft” (literally “F for force”) which was founded in Görlitz. It was inspired by a study that showed that more young women than men are moving out of the region and that women in the region need more opportunities for mutual exchange and networking (Gabler et al. 2016). Other important initiatives in the region include the Alliance of Gender Equality Officers and the Women’s Political Council of the State of Brandenburg. We conducted 15 semi-structured expert interviews (including one double interview) with women who are active in the network and knowledgeable about the transition policy process. These included equal opportunities officers of the regions, members of the state parliament, and women who are active in civil society associations. Based on the interviews we were able to make well-founded statements about which ideas of the future and needs for Lusatia are predominant and in how far criticism of the dominant transition discourse is being exercised. Since we are specifically interested in care work and its relevance for the regional transition, we also conducted a focus group with 3 women who work in the care sector in Lusatia. The interviews were conducted between June and November 2022.

For the evaluation of our material (three policy documents, 15 interviews and one focus group), we followed the methodological guidelines of qualitative content analysis (Saldaña 2009; Kuckartz 2018). The first step was to develop codes based on our theoretical approach and our initial research questions. Three of the authors each applied those codes independently to one policy paper and one interview and developed inductive codes in the process. After this independent round of coding, we discussed our coding in the group to refine the codes and develop a clear definition for each. These steps were repeated during a second round that included all 3 policy documents as well as 4 interviews. Once the codebook was finalized (see Table 1), the entire material was coded. Finally, the first author re-read all coded material and double-checked the coding.

We used general codes such as positive and negative descriptions of the current situation as well as opportunities, potentials, and needs of Lusatia to capture the dominant discourse and investigate whether different ideas dominate in the women’s network in the sense of a counter-discourse (Fairclough 2013). In accordance with our theoretical approach, we used several categories of female-associated care work to search our material for care work relevant to the regional transition. We further used codes such as “women in local politics” and “participation” to explore the perceived deficit in caring democracy (Tronto 2013; Hall 2020).

We are aware that the statements in the policy documents and in the interviews can only be compared to a limited extent. For instance, we explicitly asked our interviewees about care work in the transition that was relevant to them but did not interview representatives of the governmental discourse and therefore did not give them the opportunity to comment on this and the ongoing transition process. Therefore, by merely referring to the documents, we cannot characterize the dominant discourse on the regional transition in its entirety. Accordingly, the focus of our evaluation is on the (potential) counter-discourse. We have spoken to many different representatives of the women’s network and are therefore able to capture the theses and demands expressed, which are quite diverse as well.

In the following, we describe the challenges that our interviewees perceive in Lusatia and the diverse needs for care work that they identify in the transition process. Additionally, we show how the policy documents address these demands. When citing the interviews, we refer to them by number in square brackets. The focus group is abbreviated “FG” and the policy documents “HPS”, “LPB”, and “SSG”, respectively.

Referring to our initial research questions we found that the perspectives on local needs and the critique from the women’s network cannot be described as a counter-discourse to a dominant discourse. Many women seem to be very pragmatic in their interest in building networks and alliances figuring out “how to care” rather than defending a utopian vision. Instead, the organized Lusatian women’s emerging discourse, which is situated mostly in white, cis-hetero middle-class communities, challenges the dominant discourse in making its blindside visible: the fact that social infrastructure is in dire need of repair and the associated care work lacks funding, recognition, and the contribution of men. On the contrary, the dominant transition discourse contains the simplistic idea that the creation of industrial jobs and physical infrastructure are automatically going to lead to a positive development of social infrastructure and thus to a population influx. Our interviewees point out major gaps in this dominant discourse, but most do not question other fundamental assumptions and views such as the growth imperative that underlies the policy documents. Although their networks function very much in a bottom-up manner, they still tend to appeal to state actors, not fundamentally questioning their legitimacy but rather aiming to improve the existing decision-making process. Most of the women’s networks consciously do not frame themselves as “feminist”; despite this, many of their talking points and demands are reflected in feminist theory.

In the following, we spell out what types of care work are relevant for the transition and thus represent important pillars of “social infrastructure”, a wording also used by our interviewees [4, 11]. In doing this, we bring our theoretical approach into conversation with our interviewees’ calls for investment into multiple dimensions of social infrastructure. Referring back to Tronto (2013) and her observation that the care work involved in the repair of social infrastructure is associated with femininity and subordination may help explain why this infrastructure is currently being neglected in public spending. From the Lusatian case, we derive a concept that could be translated for other coal regions in transition. We represent the four pillars as tree trunks because we consider them organically connected. They represent the material entanglement between human memory, social arrangements, coal mines, their residual waste, and nonhuman networks. Furthermore, we understand “care as social infrastructure” as an open and non-static concept to which new pillars (as tree trunks) could be added (see Fig. 1).

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In Lusatia, we find empirical evidence for what Hall (2020) has theoretically described: a dismissal of the constantly occurring care work that is essential for the maintenance of societal and economic life at large. The need for this care work, which Hall (2020) describes as constitutive of social infrastructure, is especially apparent in regions facing social and economic challenges. This includes regions where climate protection demands the winding down of a carbon-intensive industry that was an important anchor of regional economy and identity. Using the framework of a critical discourse analysis we have found that while the policy documents relevant to the coal transition in Lusatia do mention concepts related to social infrastructure, they are neither prioritized nor is it specified what these terms encompass. We criticize this shortcoming based on feminist care theory and interviews with politically active women in the region and define four pillars of care work as social infrastructure that require further investment. We explicate each pillar with an exemplary policy recommendation for the transition in Lusatia.

To summarize, a strengthening of care work and the creation and maintenance of social infrastructure is a critical aspect of the regional transition in Lusatia that is largely overlooked in policymaking. Despite this, local women are already active every day in their communities putting thought, work, and effort into these difficult tasks. Local initiatives are a testament to the fact that maintaining our common world requires constant creative problem solving which must be considered an important site of knowledge production.