Description
South Africa became an important case study for international financing to support the energy transition in 2021 when it signed the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) with a range of western financers at COP26. However, the JETP – which provides for US$8.5 billion – has been criticised by several stakeholders for its dependence on loans. Representatives from the labour movement have described the agreement, and the type and pace of transition it imposes, as an infringement of South African sovereignty that will create new forms of dependence with the West. For these actors the energy transition that the JETP envisages is a form of neocolonialism, which delegitimises the transition and risks derailing it entirely. Through 40 key informant interviews, and 3 one-day workshops with over 130 workers in the South African coal belt, we explore the emerging layers of coloniality in the country’s energy transition. We argue that climate coloniality operates via the logics of accumulation by dispossession and epistemic dispossession where the promotion of energy privatisation and international green capital is achieved through, and reproduces, epistemic injustice for coal belt communities. Reclaiming sovereign voice is thus framed as central to re-embedding justice in a transition that promises the most significant upheaval in South Africa’s political economy in recent history.
