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Paper short abstract

South Africa’s International Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) is a capitalist response to climate change. For Donors, NGOs, investors and unions it also a (contested) moral investment. This paper explores how South Africa's JETP links economic progress, moral capitalism and climate justice

Paper long abstract

South Africa’s International Just Energy Transition Partnership is an explicitly capitalist response to climate change. Its is loans-based process aimed at revitalising and decarbonising South Africa’s energy system, with entrepreneurship and skills training promising prosperity for economically displaced coal workers. For actors all throughout this assemblage, South Africa’s Just Transition is a moral investment: donor nations and Global North technology companies will provide innovative solutions to global warming; Independent Power Producers respond to government corruption; NGOs ensure that South Africa develops “a learning culture” as mining becomes decreasingly possible; and young, black, South Africans see entrepreneurial opportunities as enabling forms of valorised wealth creation that apartheid denied to their families.

South Africa’s history and its position in the global economy ensures that the larger pools of national and international capital involved in its energy transition will be linked to white actors. Debates over the role of finance in responses to climate change are intimately tied to questions of race; with resistance to climate action frequently (publicly) associated with Black South Africans and the institutions that claim to represent them. This paper will unpack the homeostatic cluster of actors and investments that link economic progress, moral capitalism and climate justice. It will consider how their promises interact, intersect and contradict each other and how they are co-productive with South Africa’s post-apartheid political economy.