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Short abstract

Energy precarity in North Bohemia shows how Europe’s green transition layers new climate promises onto long-standing sacrifice zones. At the edge of repeated failed transitions, decarbonisation is lived as infrastructural strain, testing democratic trust in everyday life.

Long abstract

Central and Eastern Europe has repeatedly been addressed through promises of transition—industrial modernity, socialist progress, post-1989 liberalisation, European integration, and now green transformation—producing a persistent sense of never-completed change. In North Bohemia, a Czech post-industrial region shaped by coal extraction and heavy industry and formerly part of the heavily polluted “Black Triangle,” these successive projects have sedimented as layered infrastructures of expectation and disappointment. The region functions as an internal sacrifice zone, bearing disproportionate social and ecological costs of national development.

Rather than appearing as rupture, decarbonisation is encountered as another transition layered onto unresolved transformations of the past. Rising energy costs and carbon governance are interpreted through memories of industrial decline, precarious labour, and uneven Europeanisation. Climate policy thus enters everyday life not simply as environmental reform but as a renewed claim to institutional trust. It is in mundane calibrations—heating decisions, utility bills, subsidy applications—that political promise becomes measurable, translated into degrees of warmth, hours of labour, and the felt durability of democratic commitment.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with households at risk of energy poverty and local intermediaries, this paper conceptualises energy precarity as a material and affective site where the credibility of political commitment is tested. Engaging STS debates on democracy and sociotechnical imaginaries (Ezrahi; Jasanoff) and connecting sacrifice zones with Nixon’s notion of slow violence, I argue that the fragility of contemporary climate governance in CEE cannot be understood without accounting for the temporal accumulation of broken promises that shape how new ones are received.