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Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the complex variety of forces pressing to shape a climate transition in South Africa today, and the prospect of a new 'green structural adjustment'.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the struggle taking place to shape the ecological future of South Africa, a struggle which raises important questions about who will control future ecology, in whose interests, with what methods, and to what ends.

Africa as whole contributes around just 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions but is warming at twice the global mean. South Africa is Africa's major emitter as a consequence of a coal dominated energy system (Eskom) and the production of liquid fuel from coal (Sasol). These institutions were central to apartheid's racist and exclusionary 'development' project. Climate justice issues are more than energy (and pollution), of course, but relate to land use and degradation, drought, flooding, food insecurity, loss of biodiversity, and climate migration. South Africa is a country where social, class, gender, race, and environmental injustice have long been deeply intertwined in its socio-ecological system of accumulation. Whilst just transition initiatives and alternatives 'from below' exist in many forms (and movements), other, often more powerful forces, both national and global, are present, vying to shape the transition, notably:

-the EU's carbon border taxes from 2023 and their impact on South African industry;

-a rapidly changing climate finance space, and with it a likely rising debt burden;

-a rush to develop green hydrogen, largely by large corporate players;

-state contestation given important support for coal interests and gas.

Capital restructuring, job losses, and 'green washing' seem likely as a transition looks set to be complex, chaotic, contradictory, and harsh, with new forms of exclusion reproducing patterns of the past.