Conflict or Collaboration in the Management of Urban Green Areas: Activists vs. Decision‐Makers

Recent decades have been marked by a growing prominence of grassroots initiatives to protect urban green areas (UGAs), bringing into view a persistent divergence between activists and decision-makers in post-socialist cities undergoing socio-ecological transitions, in particular a tension between development pressure and the need to protect valuable UGAs. These conflicts are especially pronounced in contexts of internal suburbanisation, where peripheral green land is converted into development reserves faster than planning systems can respond. Using environmental justice (EJ) as the analytical framework, this study examines how grassroots activists challenge governance processes around UGA protection in Polish metropolitan areas: Warsaw, Kraków, Wrocław, and Gdynia (the Tricity). The research is based on a qualitative analysis of four case studies of local grassroots initiatives, drawing on in-depth interviews with activists, focus group interviews with decision-makers, and a review of planning documents. The findings show that conflicts over UGAs reflect compound environmental injustices across distributive, procedural, and recognitional dimensions, shaped by post-socialist planning legacies and suburbanisation pressure. Performative consultations and the marginalisation of community ecological knowledge recur as systemic rather than case-specific failures. Activist campaigns do produce results, but the gains are uneven: Green spaces get partially protected, yet the underlying procedural and recognitional injustices rarely get resolved. Rather than being integrated into governance, activists remain on the outside, compensating for gaps that formal planning systems and participation mechanisms leave unaddressed. The findings also suggest that spatial location, not only socio-economic position, functions as an independent axis of environmental marginalisation in post-socialist suburban contexts.