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Paper short abstract:

This paper deploys minimalist and transformative transition concepts to assess the labour movement's role in just energy transition processes in South Africa. It argues that labour does not have a central role to bring about a just energy transition due to its neoliberal and minimalist approach.

Paper long abstract:

South Africa has a plethora of climate policies and programmes for promoting a just energy transition to a low carbon future. While these have been lauded (uncritically) as pioneering in the African context, this paper deploys three analytical models of just transition, namely passive, minimalist and transformative transition to assess the extent to which the labour movement is central in transition processes of the coal value chain. This focus on the coal-value-chain is instructive because coal remains South Africa’s primary source of energy. I argue that, due to historical reasons, the labour movement has been consumed by neoliberal framing of the just transition resulting in its adoption of a minimalist stance in the struggle for just energy transition. This explains its obsession with a reformist agenda that prioritizes retraining workers for green jobs and social protection of vulnerable workers instead of transformative change. A transformative transition has potential for profound changes in the energy production regime with possibilities for overhauling prevailing realities towards renewable and sustainable energy generation. Failing to adopt a transformative agenda means South Africa’s labour movement does not have a defining role in efforts to bring about a just energy transition since it has collaborated with the neoliberal government and business on a minimalist approach to just transition. Labour has thus abdicated its historical duty of standing firm in the struggle for climate justice and just energy transition in an age when neoliberal minimalist thinking pretends to be a driver of the just energy transition.