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Short abstract:

I unpack elite efforts to go ‘off grid’ amid ongoing energy shocks in South Africa and how they may shape how climate change plays out. Pushing past questions of anticipation, I argue that the (re)making of public-private boundaries in response to environmental flux is key in making climate futures.

Long abstract:

In recent years, historic blackouts have prompted large firms, affluent households, and wealthy provinces in South Africa to install rooftop solar and independent power at unprecedented rates. While some commentators have heralded these developments as evidence of massive, ‘bottom-up’ energy transitions underway in the country, they are also constitutive of a particular climate adaptation pathway. Large-scale defection from the nation’s grid, some officials have warned, may drain the coffers of rate-dependent municipalities and South Africa’s state-owned electricity enterprise, pushing the country on a downward economic trajectory that will greatly constrain its ability to make investments in costly, collective climate-adaptive infrastructure. Drawing on interviews with officials from increasingly ‘off grid’ housing associations, firms, and provincial governments, as well as energy and financial experts, the paper explores (1) elite infrastructural secession (Fatti et al 2023) from South Africa’s national electricity grid, and (2) its implications for how researchers inquire about climate adaptation and climate futures more broadly. Although infrastructural secession is partially motivated by concerns about the country’s climate-changed future and genuinely held desires to ‘go green,’ I suggest that it is also rooted in longstanding (white) elite efforts to maintain symbolic and material boundaries from a ‘broken’ majority rule state. Thus, I conclude that inasmuch as researchers privilege representations of the future when examining what spurs collective climate action and shapes climate futures, they must also attend to extemporaneous actions in the present: specifically, the large- and small-scale ways in which public-private boundaries are (re)made in response to environmental flux.