Short Abstract

This panel interdisciplinary panel examines future visions in South Africa. Bringing together academic, practitioner, trade union, and community perspectives, it explores how competing visions of transition, justice, and governance are shaped and contested.

Long Abstract

South Africa’s democratic future is being shaped by persistent structural challenges, including high levels of unemployment, inequality, and failing infrastructure. These exist alongside pressures linked to the climate crisis, evolving forms of social mobilisation, and fracturing political opposition. This panel examines how future visions for South Africa are imagined, negotiated, and contested across diverse sites of political and social struggle. We explore how knowledge, voice, and authority are unevenly distributed, and how struggles within and between a variety of actors, including political parties, state elites, capital, trade unions, and community organisations, are shaping conversations about the country's future.

Foregrounding academic, practitioner, trade union and community-based expertise, the panel asks how competing visions of transition are constructed, whose futures they privilege, and what (if any) types of justice are being promoted. Recognising that these dynamics cannot be understood in isolation from each other, we invite contributions that adopt interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches to analysing South Africa’s contested transitions, including work on party politics, climate, AI, energy, social cohesion, and governance.

Key words: South Africa; political transitions; environmental transitions; democratic futures

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