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Short abstract

This paper examines how steel infrastructure shapes industrial decarbonization in Poland. Conceptualized as a sociotechnical megaproject, the sector reflects infrastructural lock-in, multinational ownership, and competing transition imaginaries, highlighting constraints facing CEE countries.

Long abstract

This paper examines how industrial infrastructures shape the politics of decarbonization in Central and Eastern Europe, focusing on the steel industry in Poland as particularly revealing in this aspect. Primary steelmaking relies on highly capital-intensive facilities (infrastructures), such as blast furnaces, coke plants, transmission grids, and transport networks — all of which operate within tightly coupled industrial ecosystems. In this regard, steel infrastructure can also be understood as a sociotechnical megaproject: complex configurations of industrial production, energy systems, and supply chains characterized by long-term planning, multi-actor governance challenges, and significant risks of technological lock-in (Sovacool & Geels, 2021).

Drawing on scholarship in Science and Technology Studies, this paper conceptualizes infrastructure as both a material system and a cultural form (Larkin, 2013) and as co-produced with political institutions and imaginaries (Jasanoff, 2015). In Poland, these dynamics intersect with the political economy of the post-socialist industrial transition. Following the privatizations in the 1990s and early 2000s, steelmaking assets became integrated into multinational enterprises. In consequence, decisions about the future of primary steel production are increasingly co-shaped by transnational corporate strategies rather than national or EU-level industrial policy alone. At the same time, emerging, and for some promising, decarbonization pathways — particularly hydrogen-based direct reduced iron —require new infrastructures that are currently underdeveloped in Poland. Empirically informed by expert interviews with industry and civil-society actors, this paper argues that industrial decarbonization in Poland unfolds at the intersection of infrastructural lock-in, ownership structures, and competing imaginaries of decarbonization.