Presentation short abstract

We examine how Senegal's €2.5 billion climate financing deal with France, Germany, the EU and other partners maintains colonial continuities by repackaging European economic interests as "just transitions" and how JETPs help institutionalise both green and fossil extractivism.

Presentation long abstract

Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) have been lauded by European governments as novel and ambitious instruments of climate cooperation to support the energy transition of fossil-fuel dependent countries in the Global South. However, JETPs have sparked criticism for offering mostly debt-based financing in the form of concessional loans, double counting of already committed finance, and a lack of transparency from donor governments. Unlike previous JETPs, Senegal's Agreement contains a notable exception for gas development and no phaseout conditionality. Signed amid Europe's energy crisis in 2023 and subsequent quest to diversify gas imports, Senegal's JETP thus reveals new tensions and conflicts of interest in European climate cooperation. Simultaneously, the JETP, which claims to support Senegal's green economic development and achievement of universal electricity access, will ultimately support utility-scale projects developed by European companies, furthering an enclosure of Senegalese land for renewable projects and a sovereign debt crisis inherited by the new Faye Administration. While an energy future defined by green growth is not altogether imposed, it conceals a development agenda that is not locally determined. This study contributes to the emerging scholarship on the role of international climate finance in expanding Europe's frontiers of extraction and maintaining colonial dependencies via debt traps in green and fossil infrastructures. Through the lens of Senegal’s JETP, we demonstrate how international climate finance merely defines the terms under which governments de-risk private green investment, while simultaneously consigning Global South governments as de-risking agents for fossil fuel projects from which they receive little local economic benefit.