Fragmented authority and deferred action: deconstructing environmental governance under the European Green Deal in Lithuania

This study critically examines the evolving landscape of environmental governance in Lithuania within the context of the European Green Deal, drawing on three semi-structured interviews with executive, academic, and legislative stakeholders. Using a two-phase methodology that combines thematic coding analysis with Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, the research reveals the epistemic tensions, institutional contradictions, and normative ambivalences shaping Lithuania’s green transition. The findings challenge the linear narrative of policy implementation and instead expose a fragmented field governed by binary logics, such as compliance versus conviction, center versus periphery, and participation versus performance. While official strategies emphasize legal alignment and technocratic execution, they often operate through temporal deferral, symbolic participation, and structural dependency on supranational resources. The analysis highlights the performative nature of law, the influence of post-socialist path dependencies, and the failure of procedural participation to generate democratic legitimacy. Through deconstruction, the research reframes crisis not as a catalyst for coherence, but as a condition that reveals the fragility of sustainability discourses. Ultimately, this work argues for a more reflexive, dialogic, and ethically grounded approach to environmental governance, one that recognizes contradiction not as failure, but as the very terrain of democratic transformation.