From Nimby to Lawmaking. Explaining the Impact of the Anti-Wind Farm Movement on Wind Energy Policy in Poland

In the contemporary world, including Poland, there is an increasing variety of new social movements that affect energy transition. One of them is the movement against onshore wind energy, which developed in Poland in the second decade of the 21st century on the basis of numerous controversies around the location of wind farms. The aim of the article is to explain the impact of social protests against the location of wind farms on wind energy policy in Poland, by linking the concept of NIMBY (standing for ‘Not In My Back Yard’, is a pejorative term for residents who oppose proposed local developments — such as housing, infrastructure, or shelters — near their homes, despite acknowledging the projects’ necessity elsewhere) with the concepts of social movements and energy populism. The article analyses the protesters’ motivations, their actions on local and supra-local levels, as well as actions of public authorities and institutions in relation to the anti-wind farm opposition. The article makes use of numerous source materials, including local and regional press (from regions with the highest levels of wind energy development), open letters to public authorities from opponents of wind farm siting, articles published on the websites of opponents of wind farms, documents published by public institutions, and some results of a few case-studies conducted to date. The research demonstrated how local, spatially dispersed conflicts of a NIMBY character transformed into an anti-wind movement, articulating specific demands to those in power and disseminating negative opinions about large scale wind energy using populistic rhetoric. The anti-wind farm movement has exerted an impact on higher-level Polish institutions, raising the profile of wind farm siting issues to the national level and, capitalizing on the favourable political situation, contributing to the introduction in 2016 of restrictive rules for wind farm development.