Translating the Twin Transition into University Decisions: A Governance Grammar for Polish Higher Education

Abstract

The European Union frames digitalisation and decarbonisation as a twin transition, yet institutional complementarity cannot be presumed. This conceptual article asks how Polish higher-education institutions (HEIs) can translate EU and national digital, green, skills, innovation, and place-based priorities into accountable choices. It combines purposive qualitative documentary analysis with conceptual reconstruction, drawing on EU and Polish law and policy, public ROAD2EU materials, and peer-reviewed scholarship available by 4 July 2026. The unit of analysis is the institutional choice episode: a bounded process in which an HEI authorises, funds, designs, procures, continues, scales, redesigns, pauses, stops, transfers, or retires an initiative. The synthesis develops the University Twin-Transition Decision Grammar, comprising five linked clauses: problem and place; the coupling claim; authority and affected voices; safeguards and reversibility; and warrant and disposition. Applied across teaching, research, operations, and regional engagement, the grammar requires each initiative to identify a material problem, justify digital-green additionality against credible alternatives, locate decision rights, state non-negotiable safeguards and exit conditions, and match evidence to a permissible disposition. Six propositions specify how the grammar may affect problem definition, project rejection or redesign, ownership, reversibility, evidence claims, and institutional variation. The framework is a normative proposition for empirical testing, not evidence that Polish HEIs or ROAD2EU have implemented it or achieved institutional or regional effects.