Presentation short abstract

This paper examines South Africa’s hydrogen ambitions as an instance of the “private turn” in development finance. It argues that the LCOH is a political technology that fixes the future to the horizon of bankability, while deferring redistributive responses to inequality and energy poverty.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines South Africa’s green hydrogen ambitions from the perspective of the “private turn” in development finance, where blended finance and de-risking recast states as guarantors of finance capital, oprganising public policy around the promise of private gain. In South Africa, the logic of de-risking and drive for bankability converges with hydrogen policy; yet green hydrogen remains suspended in an anticipatory impasse: central to decarbonisation and just transition narratives, but commercially too costly to pursue and largely failing to attract the required investment.

Rather than treat this stalled flow of private capital as an anomaly, I treat it as an entry point to examine the labour of making futures investible. The paper argues that the Levelised Cost of Hydrogen (LCOH) has become a key political technology in this process. Far from a neutral metric, LCOH operates as a calculative technology that carries a distinct theory of value and a theory of action: it defines hydrogen’s worth in narrowly techno-economic terms, (re)organises public policy around bankability, and produces geographies of export across the Global South.

Using South Africa as a case, I trace how LCOH rationality is institutionalised in public science, financing architectures, and speculative territorial projects. Here, green hydrogen frontier-making reveals how the demand for bankability narrows what counts as sustainable development, creating a situation where decisions in the present are dictated by speculative expectations about the future, while redistributive responses to inequality and energy poverty are continually deferred.