Viewed 29,000 times on Twitter, and both praised and ridiculed in its reply section, was a Russia Times report featuring the Deputy President of South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). In challenging the international Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP), recently signed by the South African government, he claimed:

Electricity is at the centre of the crisis we are faced with and we have to deal with it now. Look, [the] majority if not all of the major policy positions that the sitting government has taken is influenced by the western forces like the World Bank, the Western Europe and the Americans. Look at our energy policy for instance, we have been forced to rush into deep discontinuation of coal as a source of our energy forces, we have been forced to adopt irrational and senseless policies to move into renewables….

You would have seen that in COP 27, in the Conference of Parties in Glasgow, that the American president is the one who announced to the world that South Africa is going to move away from coal as a source of energy, before even South Africa was appraised of that. Recently the Secretary of Treasury from the United States came here to speak about the so called “Just Transition”. She even visited provinces to conduct workshops and even tried to give some line as to what South Africa should do. So, the Americans have largely been undermining the policy sovereignty and that is what we will resist as an anti-imperialist organisation that the EFF is, that we must have the sovereignty to take our own decisions without being dictated upon by these imperialist forces.

Many of the miners, unionists and civil activists I interviewed about South Africa’s JETP expressed similar concerns. In an environment where loadshedding ensured almost daily six-hourly blackouts, South Africans were hesitant about any potential loss of electrification. They linked decarbonisation to their distrust of intra-national decision-making systems and of South Africa’s unjust relations with the Global North. Explaining his scepticism towards the multi-stakeholder consultation process and the role of (traditionally white-led) industry bodies in this, a regional union organiser from the coal heartland of Mpumalanga explained:

The people who are at the forefront of the Just Transition are the very same people who were oppressing others…Now how can they lead that Just Transition?

Moving from intra-to-international oppression, he continued:

The very same countries who preaches that we should engage in the Just Transition, they are the very same countries who polluted to an extent that we are now affected, all of us and to an extent, it will mean that any resources that we have, we can’t exploit them until such time as we reach a point of satisfaction- they’ve exploited them, they’ve reached that level of satisfaction, they are ready to transition.

Indictments of Global North polluters and lamentations about weak or illegitimate national governance are common in Global South responses to climate change (De Wit 2015; Fisher 2015). However, the critiques made by South Africa’s mining unionists are novel in two important ways. Firstly, they foreground that climate change ‘solutions’ emerge from the same histories, relationships and institutions as the climate ‘problems’ of increased temperature. Secondly, overt rejections of climate action by Global South labour leaders complicate aspirations for worldwide alliances against global warming, particularly alliances associated with social movement unionism (see Huber 2022; Velicu & Barca 2020).

This article investigates the roles of labour and civil society in the multistakeholder consultation processes of South Africa’s JETP, one of the first national decarbonisation programmes and the largest donor-funded national transition. It builds upon the work of Cock (2012a – and others, see Baloyi et al. 2022, Death 2014), who asks why South Africa’s unions and civil society organisations claim to support transformative climate action, but consultations in which they participate have promoted a narrow, reformist transformation. In providing a partial answer to this question, the article first argues that the structures of civil society engagement—embedded in the JETP funding mechanisms—manufacture consent for status-quo, neoliberal environmentalism; complicating this answer, it then claims that the technocratic approaches to climate justice that emerge from the JETP’s consultation processes are incongruous with the notions of justice that motivate South Africa’s unionised workers. The article therefore draws from and contributes to two bodies of literature: works exploring the neoliberal governmentality of global environmental policy (Death & Gabay 2015); and studies of union-civil society mobilisation (Velicu & Barca 2020; Werbner 2014). To the former, I offer one of the first case studies of a central technology for delineating ‘climate justice’, detailing how multistakeholder consultations have emerged as a key instrument of green governmentality. To the latter, I foreground the understated role of identity in motivating both unionised workers and civil society activists, and argue that attempts to align for ‘whole of society social justice’ are hampered by their obfuscation and delegitimization of varied identarian claims.

The article draws from interviews conducted with CSO and NGO staff, miners and trade unionists from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) over two trips in the second half of 2022. The first of these trips was funded entirely by my university, with contact with unionists made possible through ongoing relationships with Zambia’s organised labour. On this first trip, my status as a white anthropologist resonated with professional policy-focused NGO staff, whose work entwines technocratic and activist politics. My second trip was facilitated by the IndustriALL Global Union Confederation’s South Africa office.Footnote 1 While my association with this black-led union institution gave me credibility with some unionists, it also gave me the aura of an international consultant. During this trip, my whiteness, combined with the British government announcing its intention to open its first coal mine in 30 years, seemingly foregrounded a key North–South White-Non-white climate injustice, encouraging miners to explicate links between their national JETP and global exploitation. IndustriALL assisted me in attending, both online and in person, several stakeholder engagement sessions of the Presidential Climate Commission (PCC). These included a National Colloquium on Energy Recommendations; a Multistakeholder session on Understanding the Contents of South Africa’s Just Energy Transition Investment Plan; and a Skills for a Just Transition Hybrid Seminar. I also draw from recordings of sessions I did not attend. I deliberately obfuscate key details of my interlocuters, while attempting to provide data relevant to their responses. I appreciate that this may be frustrating for some readers; however, the politicised nature of policy research in South Africa means that respondents have been punished when their statements appear in academic outputs (see Murray 2019).

The article first describes global and South African Just Transition discourses and practices, linking theory about green governance and social movement unionism to the specifics of South Africa’s political economy. It then describes the initial rollout of the JETP and discussions about the Just Transition in PCC workshops and among union and civil society actors who attended them. Finally, the paper considers the disjuncture between union and civil society priorities in challenging the JETP.

Enabling, resisting and shaping green governance through the JETP

This article uses a case study of South Africa’s JETP to build upon insights into developmental governmentalities in the climate change space. It describes how multistakeholder consultations have become a key component of international green governance, both verbalising civil society’s critiques and rendering these critiques into market logic. While previous studies have detailed how International Financial Institution (IFI)-guided consultations enable limited politicisation in autocratic regimes, I argue that in the context of South Africa’s powerful but divided civil society, these spaces encourage a consensus building that depoliticised the primacy of market (and donor) imperatives over radical, rights-based claims. This argument then dovetails into a critique of how union-civil society relations are conceptualised, with workers’ concepts of social justice delegitimised as identarian, and professional CSO/NGO concept of justice venerated as objective.

In describing the Millenium Development Goals (MDS), Death and Gabay (2015) foreground a core tension in the governmentality of IFI and Global-Institution-led development. The MDGs served as a form of antipolitics, attributing underdevelopment to Global South nations in a manner which precluded engagement with international injustice. However, they are also deeply biopolitical, incentivising and demanding drastic changes in the lives and aspirations of Global South subjects. Several authors have detailed how the antipolitics-biopolitics nexus has been extended into environmentalism (Grove 2010). A ‘green governmentality’ has emerged, where environmental challenges in the lives of Global South citizens are framed as ‘global issues’. These global issues then justify North–South interventions (Death et al. 2013). The economics and power dynamics of such interventions are depoliticised as ‘common sense’, while they demand changes to locally-embedded ways of being in areas as significant as gender and sexual identity. Interventions are evaluated as successful through reports written by the interveners and are rescaled to become travelling models of good practice.

Connected to the best practices of global environmental governance are discourses of the Green Economy. These discourses are forms of thought and representation that produce governable activity, knowledge and subjectivity, contouring debates of environmental governance and the space for resisting these (see Death 2014). In South Africa, there are two dominant discursive framings for the Just Transition (Cock 2012a). The minimalist position implies existing social justice (or at least that the nation is on the path towards it). Justice within the transition will then be protected through government subsidies for green jobs, forms of compensation for adversely affected communities and procedural justice, through stakeholder consultation. In contrast, a radical position acknowledges the injustice of South Africa’s intra-national political economy and global subordination and calls for an alternative growth path (Cock 2012a). A key legacy of the anti-apartheid struggle is that, more than many other nations, South Africa’s politics acknowledges global- and local structural injustices (Lieberman 2022). Both the National Government and major unions draw from discourses of radical change when discussing the Just Transition, yet South Africa’s policy processes are legitimising a minimalist approach to climate injustice (see COSATU 2022; Sweeney 2022).

A core actor of North–South governmentality has long been internationally funded NGOs and (sub-grant receiving) CSOs. As donor states increasingly attributed underdevelopment to a lack of ‘good governance’ in the Global South, NGOs and CSOs became a key way for donors to engage with, yet disavow, Global South nations’ internal politics (Fraser 2006; Wright 2012). Some NGOs specialised in working with governments, creating balanced budgets and transparent spending; others focused on mobilising their citizenry to demand accountability or to change citizens’ behaviour, typically attempting to enhance development without increasing government spending by reducing corruption and by creating entrepreneurial subjects (Whitfield & Fraser 2009). Good governance NGOs compete for funds from Global North agencies—reiterating to these agencies the legitimacy of their approach, while their symbols of wealth ensure that their actions are entwined with the promise of ‘development’ (De Vries 2007).

An emerging tool in NGO-facilitated good governance is the multi-stakeholder agreement, including in the green governance space. In formal multistakeholder agreements, such as the ethical logging framework FLEGT,Footnote 2 stakeholders in the form of government, business and civil society sit together to determine formal rules for an industry (Appel 2019; see also Reinsberg and Westerwinter 2021). In spaces like the JETP, stakeholder consultation is typically a condition of funding, yet the exact nature of this consultation is rarely proscribed. Consultation therefore convolves high-level discussions between government, industry leaders and international policy experts, with workshops where officials explain policies and take limited questions from businesses and CSOs. Some academics have argued that multistakeholder spaces can enable political contestation, especially in authoritarian regimes (Appel 2019). Other works state that they occlude power disparities, moving towards a consensus that reflects the interests of those with the least to lose from leaving negotiations—typically international capital (Bohling 2011).

South Africa’s JETP complicates many assumptions about multistakeholder consultation and the role of civil society in ‘green’ and ‘good’ governances more generally. Rather than being funded and constrained by international capital and facilitated participation, South Africa’s civil society is vibrant, diverse and has multiple avenues to influence government. Select, policy-focused NGOs sit upon the National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC), an ‘invited space’ where government, labour, business and community have long negotiated the creation of policy (McKinley 2012). Outside this is a large collection of social movements, which use protest as an ‘invented space’ to make demands for services and resource redistribution (Chance 2018). South Africa’s CSOs, NGOs and unions claim legitimacy from the apartheid struggle and from the importance of rights and development to the post-apartheid political settlement (Lieberman 2022). However, these organisations are deeply divided in a manner that draws from, but does not map perfectly onto, race and class divisions and the organic nature of various CSOs and NGOs is contested (Anciano 2012). ‘White’ and ‘middle-class’ organisations engage in the monitoring and technocratic advocacy roles required by the Good Governance agenda (Dudouet 2011; Habib 2005). They seemingly form part of what Huber (2022) describes as the ‘professional class’, an advanced segment of the labour market whose politics are less focused on struggles over material resources and more on how knowledge can be used to create policy improvement without confrontation. In contrast, ‘Black’ organisations, often emerging form a radical response to apartheid, either make moral demands for resource redistribution in formal spaces or enact more revolutionary claims through protest (Chance 2018; Meyer 2002). This study of the JETP in South Africa contributes to the green governance literature by arguing that within the processes of multistakeholder discussions, claims for more radical justice are ‘heard’, legitimising consultation without changing its outcome, while ‘middle-class’ discursive techniques and programme-centred resource claims encourage important concessions, yet cement neoliberal governance. Further, South Africa’s ongoing poverty has generated CSOs, like those found elsewhere in Africa, that are funded and incentivised to engage enthusiastically in multistakeholder consultation.

Crucial to South Africa’s Just Transition, and this paper’s second key contribution is understanding how unionist motivation frames and constrains potential resistance within multistakeholder governance. When compared to other CSOs, unions are typically excellent at mobilisation and have substantial financial resources that are independent of international development’s funding systems. In South Africa specifically, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the union confederation of which the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and formally the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) were key members and hold an official role in government, as part of the tripartite alliance with the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) (Cock 2019). These unions were early supporters of a radical Just Transition. However, as I will show, their demands for justice increasingly question the viability of any transition, counterintuitively asking less, rather than more, from their state. Academics have sought to understand how to encourage unionised workers to ‘move from tangible solidarities’ (Harvey 2001: 173) and ‘reach beyond the workplace’ towards whole of society social justice (Moody 1997:207, see also Waterman 1993). Focusing specifically on the Just Transition, Velicu and Barca (2020) claim that a key distinction between labour activists and environmental thinkers is that the former focuses on identitarian claims that are necessarily capitalist in nature, while the latter aims for post-capitalist social justice.

A commonly invoked panacea of union-civil society engagement is ‘social justice unionism’ (Von Holdt 2003). This term initially described the linking of unions and social movements to fight the injustice of apartheid. It is now increasingly understood as attempts to channel unions’ organising power and mobilising capacity into alliances with civil society, which supersede class identity (Werbner 2014). I argue that this narrative obfuscates the ongoing role of identity in shaping who unions align with and what unionised workers will fight for. I also argue for understanding the identarian components of ‘the professional class’ and through this consider how inconsistencies in the meanings of social justice have emerged and shaped discussions over the JETP.

South Africa’s JETP and the Political Economy of Multistakeholder Consultation

In November 2021, the South African government signed the first international Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP). This unlocked 8.5 billion USD in grants, loans and investment incentives from Britain, France, Germany and the European Union (European Commission., 2022). JETP funding is to be used to assist in South Africa’s transition to a lower-carbon economy and to boost investment in, and production of, renewable energy. The South African government has also taken on a 497 million USD loan to decommission and repurpose the Komati coal-fired power plant and a separate 600 million Euro loan to reduce its reliance on coal (European Commission 2022).

South Africa’s energy system is ripe for reform. While the African continent is responsible for less than 3% of global carbon emissions, South Africa contributes almost a third of these (Anderson 2016). It is the 13th highest emitting nation in terms of total carbon, emits almost ten times as much carbon per capita as neighbouring Zimbabwe and has higher per person emissions than England (Baloyi et al 2022). The electricity system is unreliable and indebted. Loadshedding from ageing powerplants reached 1900 h from the beginning of 2022 to the end of November, wiping over 4 billion rand per day from GDP (Gouden and Mokhoali. , 2022). Eskom is 423 billion rand in debt and over the last 12 years household power prices have increased 472%.

Complicating any reform, coal is also a core provider of jobs, and electricity is a right guaranteed in South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution. Coal exportation has long subsided household electrification, which has risen from 35% of households in 1994 to 87% in 2016 (Lieberman 2022). Demand for discount electricity continues to inspire urban and rural protest (Chance 2018). Employment is also a right, yet South Africa’s unemployment rate is 39.9%. Coal-fired electricity directly employs approximately 100,000 South Africans (89,000 in coal mining and 12,000 in Eskom) (Ward & Sharma 2020), while the coal value-chain and coal’s role in facilitating manufacturing facilitates over two million jobs (Ward & Sharma 2020). Coal miners’ median pay of 600 USD a month is twice the median of other formal sector workers. Eskom’s workers earn an average of 900 USD a month (Ward & Sharma 2020).

While its funding mechanisms demand subnational participation, South Africa’s JETP is shaped by the norms of donor finance. Only 3% of its 8.5 billion USD is in grants, with the vast majority instead in investment guarantees and commercial and concessional loans (Zulu 2022). IFIs have presented the JETP as an opportunity to increase privatisation and marketisation in the electricity sector. The IMF invoked the JETP when calling for the dismantling of Eskom—the state-owned power company—the laying-off of workers and the need for ‘full cost recovery’ on South African electricity. It continued that ‘competition from private firms is necessary’ to complete this transition (Sweeny 2022). The World Bank sees the JETP as part of a triple transition: mitigating climate change by moving to a low-carbon economy; adapting to climate change by increasing national resilience; and protecting the poor and vulnerable through the Just Transition (World Bank 2022). However, the Bank argues for pro-market reforms that will ‘ensure that the employment gains obtained in the new market transition will materialise in the private sector’ (Ninan 2022).

Key issues in the decarbonisation and revitalization of South Africa’s electricity system are the role of Independent Power Producers (IPPs) and of state-controlled electricity. Under debt relief provided in 2023, Eskom is barred from investing in new renewable energy generation, leaving this task to private enterprises (Musonda 2023). Just Transition-associated funds have been used in the decommissioning of the Komati Power Plant and Hendrina Power Station, replacing (under-capitalised) coal with (inadequate) renewables and failing to fully compensate workers. Komati’s revitalisation through renewables will provide vastly less electricity than at its coal-fired peak (COSATU 2022). Further, the decommissioning does not involve clear guidance for transitioning the hundreds of outsourced employees. Hendrina Power Station is due to be decommissioned by 2025, and four of its ten generating units have already been switched off (COSATU 2022). Its 500 contracted workers will not receive any retrenchment benefits. The power station is also estimated to support 10,000 jobs indirectly and contributes 2 billion Rand to municipal GDP (COSATU 2022).

The JETP’s combination of market expansion and simultaneous consultation and roll-out has been heavily criticised by unions and civil society. A NUMSA policy researcher explained that for his union a Just Transition necessitated a ‘transformation of the social-colonial structure’. He then described the transition currently being undertaken as a ‘takeover of public utility by private hands’, noting that Eskom’s transition, the refitting of coal-fired power stations with renewables, was scheduled to produce vastly less electricity that the Department of Minerals and Energy’s engagement with Independent Power Producers. Linking intra-national inequality to international exploitation, the unionist observed that the intellectual property associated with renewable energy is almost exclusively held outside South Africa. A market-driven transition therefore served to ‘export jobs to other countries from a country where more than 70% of the youth are unemployed’.

Labour leaders and some NGO staff argued that the JETP’s multistakeholder consultation space was ‘a box-ticking exercise’. Critics noted that private discussions among government and IFIs shaped the Just Transition’s financial parameters, and questioned whether the multistakeholder consultation workshops could produce change. The NUMSA researcher continued:

The World Bank is the one who is writing the strategy for Eskom, is the one who is telling Eskom “this is what you must do” and this is happening without the workers… it came as a complete package and it is only now they are selling it.

The concerns about consultation’s ability to influence policy were acknowledged by the PCC. In the Integrated Energy Transition Dialogue, the PCC’s facilitator asserted:

We are fundamentally committed to procedural justice… JET-IP (Just Energy Transition Implementation Plan) was formulated through initially the partnership group with the international partners but secondly then taken through a governance process where, yes colleagues and comrades are correct, it was adopted by the cabinet, but the President indicated when he launched the investment plan…that the PCC is now mandated to undertake a series of thorough stakeholder consultations domestically, so one may argue that the investment plan, the JET-IP is now cast in concrete, as a PCC we don’t think that is the case.

However, he also noted that these intra-national negotiations were subject to international constraints. When unionists expressed that they felt the consultation process needed to be slowed down, a PCC secretariate member replied that ‘as a small and open economy, we cannot control the pace of this’. She explained that South Africa could be locked out of the European market through a carbon border tax.

Other works have strongly criticised the ability of participatory spaces to meaningfully influence government, arguing instead that they legitimise decisions that have already been made. There are good reasons to believe that this would be less true for South Africa’s JETP, due to the political significance of the nation’s civil society and its history of insider advocacy and effective protest (Chance 2018; McKinley 2012). Instead, of conceptualising the JETP consultation process as a ‘box-ticking exercise’ the following section focuses on the process of these discussions, where CSOs and NGOs were encouraged to push for marginal reforms within the multistakeholder spaces; and trade unions increasingly disengaged from the JETP.

Stakeholder engagement in the Presidential Commission on Climate Change

Crucial to the international JETP is its engagement with subnational stakeholders. This engagement mirrors the norms of IFI-led initiatives, with trainings, workshops and civil society consultation. In many nations, such consultation legitimises good governance projects, along with their market orientation and their idealised solutions (see Whitfield & Fraser 2009). However, South Africa’s JETP has a more complex role, it must move towards consensus among those who have a genuine ability to impede it (see Cock 2019; Lieberman 2022). I now argue that partial consent was obtained among CSO and NGO participants through processes that focused upon empathising with their complaints, while momentum towards consensus was obtained through the interplay between the identities and interests of various groups invited to multistakeholder workshops. In doing so, I divide civil society participants in the JETP multistakeholder consultations into three groups: those that made non-identarian claims for policy improvement; those motivated by identarian claims for social justice; and organisations that engaged with the JETP to fund themselves. This is a heuristic topology, with differing organisations and staff defying simplistic categorisation. It is, however, a categorisation that reflects existing literature on South African civil society and that explains the interplay between claims made within JETP multistakeholder consultations (see Anciano 2012; Dudouet 2011).

Tied to the JETP is a collection of multistakeholder workshops and community engagement sessions. These events were typically simultaneously online and in-person. However, the Integrated Energy Transition Dialogue with Organised Labour was online only, as loadshedding prevented the use of a venue with a computer system. It was common for online participants to believe that they received inferior treatment. At the National Colloquium on Energy Recommendations, online participants were not accommodated in the caucus sessions, leading to claims that ‘The PCC is only interested in the voices of those who can fly to Johannesburg’. When these complaints were made, representatives of the PCCC would apologise, and agree that ‘these were not how things should have been done’. However, they would then stress the need for continued engagement and improvement within the timeline dictated by a global emergency and South Africa’s status as a small, open economy.

The focus on engagement and on hearing participants counterintuitively impeded substantive debate. The programme for the Dialogue for Organised Labour was to begin with an hour of presentations, then to have two hours of discussion. Instead, the meeting began with half an hour of the PCC empathetically receiving union bodies’ objections that the meeting was not occurring face-to-face. After the presentations, questions and comments were collated, with the PCC representative careful not to cut off any speaker. At the two hour and forty-five-minute mark, the PCC thanked organised labour for its contributions and assured unionists of their validity, without engaging with key areas of disagreement. Similarly, in the Multistakeholder Session on Understanding the Contents of South Africa’s Just Energy Transition Investment Plan, consultants from the World Bank took questions in batches of five to ten, nominally responding to statements from up to seventy participants. However, through combining their answers they minimised rebuttal or follow-up questions. At the National Colloquium on Energy Recommendations, the expert presentations were broadcast, then the government representatives wrote final, almost exclusively positive reports. The conclusions of these reports were primarily platitudes including ‘We are in the middle of a global climate crisis; we must decarbonise’ and ‘Electricity is closely linked to people’s ability to participate in the economy and to their access to basic goods and services including health’.

During most multistakeholder consultations, technopolitical, policy-focused organisations contributed most extensively. These organisations, included the national subsets of international organisations like the World Wildlife Fund and national economic and social research bodies, made policy suggestions aimed at improving South Africa, often invoking radical claims to national economic justice. However, they linked these claims to specific technocratic improvements. Like Huber’s (2022) professional class, their inputs were framed as non-identarian, drawing legitimacy from their research and their claims towards whole-of-society progress. The staff of these organisations were often aware of their privilege, self-consciously describing their organisations as ‘middle-class NGOs’ or (despite the ethnic diversity of their staff) ‘white NGOs’. Multistakeholder forums played to the strengths of these organisations. They were more able to achieve concessions through engaging with the miniature of presentations. Questioning on the relevance of a World Bank PowerPoint presentation demonstrating increased platinum jobs in 2035 to coal miners in Mpumalanga today, forced the PCC representative to concede that they were asking the miners and mine communities to take ‘known short-term risks for long-term benefits’. This led to a commitment to engage in more immediate training within Mpumalanga.

Engaging in discussions on specifics covertly legitimised the overriding dynamics of the JETP. At the Workshop on the Just Transition’s Financing Mechanism, a representative of an African economic justice organisation argued for tagging mechanisms that would enable a greater emphasis on systemic issues and broader social injustices. The PCC’s facilitator acknowledged this contribution. However, he later noted that the tagging framework for finance needed to match donor priorities as much as South African concepts of justice. Further, technocratic consultation and a technological movement towards green energy appealed to these professional NGO staff’s subjectivities. They were often inspired by the win-wins available through renewable energy, highlighting the ‘wonderful opportunity’ that solar power offered. They would advocate for the JETP when other stakeholders expressed scepticism. In responding to hesitancy from miners and industry groups about the pace of the coal phase-out, the representative of a globally recognised NGO opined; ‘I think we need a learning culture’, she then drew upon best practice from other nations’ energy transitions.

Also present at PCC consultations were explicitly identarian stakeholder representatives. These representatives were primarily differentiated from those of technopolitical organisations through making claims on behalf of a marginalised group, typically one that was identified in South Africa’s progressive constitution (Lieberman 2022). They were also less likely to come from international organisations and less frequently challenged specific policies in their statements. These identarian claim-makers would be ‘heard’ when calling for radical structural change, linking the injustices of South Africa’s national political economy to the justice promised through the JETP. However, they were rewarded for making claims that were achievable within the JET IP’s tools. A disability consultant bemoaned:

I’m from the grassroots level, I’m representing the disability sector… when you are talking with investment, others are left behind, mostly our black communities, and mostly the people who are vulnerable to this climate change… loadshedding, you’ll find the electricity is off in the township, but not [at] the companies, because the companies have to produce because it is all about money …lets consider from down to top and then [the] top will also adapt and also mitigate.

While his statement was applauded and the PCC thanked him for his passion, they also noted that many of his concerns ‘might be out of the scope of the JTP project’. In contrast, organisations representing youths would often specifically demand skills training. Linking a generational injustice, widely acknowledged in South Africa, to the JETP, across each of the conferences were calls for ‘Socially owned re-skilling/upskilling youth’, to ‘empower workers to make a choice, have the reskilling opportunities to make it happen’ and a demand that the government ‘take the skills challenge seriously’. Youth representatives would then be connected with government employees who could facilitate funded training.

The final broad category of PCC participants were CSOs which had been created primarily to attend workshops, receive sitting fees and seek government funding. The members of these organisations often held a passion for social justice but tailored their claims to a CSO landscape created through the incentives offered for participation. The members of one ex-miners’ association explained:

We sit at PCC meetings, we sit at Department of Fishery, Forest and Environment, we sit at Department of Water and Sanitation… we attend all these meetings, then even if we want opportunities, it is so difficult.

Their organisation existed to attend consultation workshops and seek additional financial opportunities through these. To one official, they had suggested ‘becoming ambassadors for the Just Transition’; at another workshop, they asked for a call for proposals.

The ex-miners were sceptical about the Just Transition, yet attending these sessions was their primary form of income. This encouraged them to engage willingly and to ask questions that were predicated on the continued roll-out of the transition. An ex-miner recalled:

Its so discouraging to go to these meetings, because there is no point, we fly to them. No I’m coming here just to eat and sleep, eat and sleep, doesn’t help. We go back home, there is nothing that is going to help.

Yeah, but they are expensive places… we sleep well, if I may take my kids there and see the places that we sleep (laughs), the food that we eat, but when we come back there is nothing. When you get into that gate “papa where is the plate, did you bring money?” There is nothing.

Tying into the debate about ‘organic’ civil society in South Africa, these movements were an organic response to poverty in Mpumalanga and to the opportunities offered by the JETP (Anciano 2012). However, in the context of the heavily proscribed nature of ‘invited spaces’ of engagement with South Africa’s JETP, the interplay between various forms of civil society reinforced the legitimacy of the market-driven processes. Professional, technocratic organisations achieved concessions through engaging with the programme specificity of various JET IP projects while advocating engagement with the JETP; right-based claims would be heard, but would be (somewhat) rewarded if they were rendered legible with project priorities; while other organisations were financially incentivised to participate in any JETP. Rather than being a ‘complete package’, CSO and NGO participation in multistakeholder spaces seemingly influenced the PCC process, encouraging the identification of discrete, improvable injustices within a donor (and therefore capital) driven transition.

Unions in the Just Transition

Unlike civil society, both inside and outside of multistakeholder consultations, mining unions’ representatives did little to provide legitimacy to the JETP. Their engagement in the process contrasted with the previous support COSATU, NUMSA and to a lesser extent NUM had offered for a radical transition. Inside the invited spaces of the JETP unions invoked anti-imperialist narratives that convolved energy security (through non-renewables) with a rejection of Global North control and hypocrisy. Outside of these invited spaces, more junior leaders questioned the justness of a transition in which their voices were not heard. In explaining why union-civil society alliances have not born a claim for a radical transition, this section details unions’ increasing discontent with the transition offered, a discontent that has counterintuitively led them to weaker claims for justice. A final section considers the ideological basis of tensions between unions and CSOs.

COSATU has advocated for a Just Transition since 2009. It has incorporated environmental sustainability into its Growth Plan Towards Full Employment, calls for full rights-based electrification and blames the climate crisis on capitalist accumulation (COSATU 2022). It has endorsed climate justice campaigns centred upon the reduction and eventual eradication of coal-fired electrification, in exchange for guarantees that Just Transition employment will provide ‘decent jobs’ that promote equality. It also campaigns against the unbundling of Eskom into generation, transmission and distribution. Despite this, Cock (2019) conceptualises COSATU’s role in the Just Transition as a ‘social dialogue’—a benign, non-confrontational approach that poses little or no challenge to the mainstream pro-growth, pro-business transition. Her description builds upon Marais’ (2011) belief that COSATU has shifted from ‘social movement unionism’ to ‘social unionism’; attempting to channel its organising power, mobilising capacity and participation in political alliances to shape national, economic and social development. Less generously, Pillay (2013) claims that COSATU is increasingly engaged in ‘political unionism’, remaining close to the centre of power to obtain limited patronage for its members and personal promotion for its officers. Further, van Niekerk (2019) argues that by 2014, COSATU had grown increasingly insular, focusing less on climate change and more on tensions between NUM and NUMSA.

NUMSA, South Africa’s largest union, has a fractious relationship with COSATU. NUMSA was expelled from COSATU in 2013 and officially withdrew support for the ANC in 2017 (Sitas 2017). In their response to the Just Transition, and in more general policy spaces, labour academics have depicted NUMSA as among the most progressive of the major unions (Cock 2012b). Much of the academic praise for NUMSA is for their work with the International Trade Unions for Energy Democracy organisation (e.g. Cock 2019). They have called for the social ownership of all renewable energy, including the opening of Eskom for alternative, but de-commodified electrification. In 2018 NUMSA took the government to court to stop the signing of an agreement with the Independent Power Producers of renewable energy, claiming that the agreement would cost 30,000 jobs and reduce rights-based electricity access. However, recent critics claim that NUMSA has reverted towards a patriarchal, bureaucratic form of unionism (Murray 2019).

With 160,000 members and producing former and current presidents, the National Union of Mineworkers has long been among the strongest unions in COSATU. However, its gravitas was drastically reduced by the Marikana massacre, and between 2010 and 2015, the union lost over a third of its members (Botiveau 2017). NUM initially offered uneasy support for an energy transition. However, the union has grown increasingly obstructive, objecting to both the tone and policy specifics of the JETP. NUM’s leadership called specific aspects of the JETP ‘green structural adjustment’. It favours using all current mines to exhaustion through clean coal and carbon capture technologies and has advocated for increased nuclear power. NUM calls for the revitalisation of Eskom, a moratorium on the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Program and low-carbon generation capacity ‘that is consistent with preserving energy sovereignty’.

An entwinement of energy sovereignty, anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism was the dominant discourse among labour representatives I observed in multistakeholder consultations. This discourse was emboldened by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Global North responses, which indirectly contributed to energy poverty in South Africa. NUM was often at the forefront of these critiques, but they were shared across unions. The NUM Climate Change Expert was the first respondent to the PCC’s JET IP presentation at the session for Organised Labour. He explained:

Germany are advanced in terms of JET [Just Energy Transition]. When they were hit by the Ukraine-Russia war, the legislature was in the position to actually sanction for the emergency return of their mothballed coal power stations… evidently in their JET they were careful that their JET was such that it does preserve energy security.

Later in the meeting, linking Germany’s energy security to a broader history of injustice, a COSATU Policy Expert stated:

The Germans’ shift from coal to renewables was on the basis that Germans themselves used their coal to finance their engagements…but what the country [South Africa] is forced to do is to actually shoulder the burden of the shift with no guarantees.

‘Energy sovereignty’ when invoked by representatives of each union, manifested as mothballing, rather than closing power stations, slowing decommissioning and investing in nuclear and clean coal. Claims to energy sovereignty would begin with anti-imperial discourse that indicted the hypocrisies of Britain, Germany, the United States of America or China. However, most unionists would then link this to technical scepticism to renewable energy’s baseload power or more general viability, often arguing that South Africa ‘should not be rushed’.

Linked to the energy sovereignty maintained by developed nations but seemingly denied to South Africa was a critique of intra-and-international development capitalism. Again, this critique was most overtly prosecuted by NUM, but was expanded upon by other union representatives. At the session for organised labour, the NUM General Secretary (GS) explained that:

All this investment in the sector, its going to come out as loans and those loans will be going to Independent Power Producers. That is the reality of the energy trajectory in South Africa, because when you are talking about renewables, you are talking about Independent Power Producers with little or no public involvement in that.

Linking the national to the international, a Public Service Union representative observed:

I have been trying to see where is the “just” in the plan as it is being presented to us… UNFCC talks of developed countries supporting developing countries …the support is actually giving loans to the developing countries and developing countries having these loans…it forces them to maintain some financial prudence.

These radical critiques offered by senior unionists framed a commitment to protecting workers’ quotidian interests, often in a manner that reinforced the status quo. The COSATU Policy Researcher described the JETP as a ‘toxic and dangerous plan’ that has ‘the potential to pit trade unions against their members’. The NUM GS continued ‘as long as our job security of our members is guaranteed, we can agree … our interest is different to others, our interest is their job security’. When asked about civil society’s frustration with union engagement, a COSATU-affiliated researcher stated ‘the union’s first job is to defend its members’.

Among the miners and junior unionists I spoke to, there was a similar critique of the intra- and international power dynamics through which ‘justice’ was embedded into this transition and a scepticism of their union leaders’ ability or desire to demand social justice. Despite the presence of NUMSA, COSATU and NUM representatives on the PCC, unionists from Mpumalanga felt their voices were not heard. The regional union representative whose critiques open the article explained:

Just for who? If it is for me and I’m not there then how just can it be? Who is this one who represents me in those courtrooms where this “Just” is manufactured.

Linking workers’ supposed intra-national marginalisation to international injustice he claimed:

The very same capitalists are managing the agenda of the Just Transition…it’s a word that talks about how to maintain the status quo… We’ve got the G7 countries who call the shots, if they want they will tell us to shut down every coal mine from tomorrow… if we look at who owns that mines…it is the very same G7 countries.

He concluded by rejecting the current Just Transition, entwining sovereignty with carbon emissions in explaining:

We are a country, I think we should stand up for ourself, we should think for ourself, if we are to pollute then so be it. If we are to pollute for a purpose and we use our resources to get to the point where we can transition.

Literature on Just Transitions often has sympathy with arguments against colonialisation, and foregrounds the miniscule carbon contributions of those in the Global South and the transnational poor (De Wit 2015). However, this sympathy rarely extends to a license to continue to pollute until a higher level of affluence, especially for significant emitters like South Africa. A similar, partial solidarity can be found among many in the NGO space, acknowledging that Global South workers have contributed little to climate change, yet emphasising (and debatably overstating) the benefits they will receive from any transition. It is this tension the paper turns to now, considering how workers’ claims are framed as unduly identarian, in contrast to legitimate ‘local’ or universal claims.

Development organisation union tensions

In addition to concerns about the JETP’s legitimation process, the unions’ and CSOs’ specific objections foreground tensions in labour-civil society alliances. These alliances, framed through social movement unionism, are often presented as a panacea to the disempowerment of progressive political actors. Unions offer the ability to bring vastly more people to a protest than almost any progressive movement; while CSOs and NGOs supposedly assist unions in having their members ‘look beyond the workplace’ to ‘whole of society social justice’ (see Moody 1997 and Waterman 1993). While vibrant debates rage as to whether social movement unionism is still the correct paradigm for understanding South African labour, recent works investigate its supposed revitalisation (see Pillay 2017). Through its multistakeholder spaces, the JETP is structured to incorporate organised labour and civil society organisations. Progressive thinkers believe an alliance between these groups is crucial for pushing past a ‘status quo’ Just Transition (Velicu & Barca 2020). This final section considers a key impediment to this alliance; the perception of some justice claims as non-identarian and the delegitimization of some identarian claims.

The most significant tension between the unions and NGOs was over the future of Eskom and the Independent Power Producers. Policy-focused NGO staff claimed that the unions impeded progress through ‘thinking short-term’ and resistance to private renewable energy. They also questioned the ‘nationalistic fervour’ that miners associated with non-renewable energy. NGO professionals claimed that union representatives ‘did not understand’ their own call for a fully-socialised Eskom, which they implied were ghost-written by the international Trade Unions for Energy Democracy organisation. While there was likely a classed aspect to these statements (see Huber 2022), they represented a core tension between civil society and unionists’ approaches to the Just Transition and social justice more generally. Calls for social justice often assume that knowledge workers are defining a monolithic progressive stance, that is non-identarian or that respects some legitimate identity claims- from which ‘worker’ is often excluded as a capitalist invention. Velicu and Barca (2020) argue that crucial to a Just Transition is having workers transcend identarian claims; Rosemberg (2019) argues that they must focus on their genuine long-term (post-work) interests. In the Just Transition, and other progressive social spaces, there is also a tendency to see identities tied to place as more legitimate than worker identities (see Murray 2019).

For the miners and unionists I spoke to, their definition of justice emerged from their mining identity. Older unionists invoked the struggle against apartheid and miners described the dangers of mining and its toll on their bodies, and saw the comfort that permanent work and a pension provided a miner and their family as a ‘just’ response. Others saw mine contracting, resource exploitation and even the possibility of mine ownership, as part of an aspiration that had long been denied to them, and ‘justice’ as inexplicably tied to black South Africans’ access to these opportunities. These were both classed and neoliberal conceptions of justice, but they were ‘justices’ that emerged from miners’ lived experiences.

If a key component of the Just Transition is having union members ‘marching alongside environmental organisations’ then it is important to consider the experiences of injustice that inspire them to march (Barca 2015). Rather than representing ignorance or base self-interest, the claims to social justice that mobilised miners were deeply embedded in their worker subjectivities. A unionist explained:

Some people think for us it is just about keeping employment and we view it more broadly because we think that its time that everyone participate in the benefiting of this particular economy…[the] transition to “Just”… its more like renewables…status quo [in economic relations] remains.

A justice built through economic participation and a challenge to the ‘status quo’ of global capitalism and donor-driven development did not resonate as strongly with many professional NGO staff and with the international progressive actors they aligned with (see Huber 2022). In understanding unions’ engagement with the JETP, it is important to explore the tensions between unionists and other civil society actors, but also the relationship between identities built through work and the concepts of justice that they inspire.

Conclusion

South Africa’s JETP partnership is a neoliberal response to climate change. It is predicated upon creating debt in a Global South nation and using market-based mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions of the poor. Through negotiations over the exact nature of the loans, donors and IFIs maintain significant control over South Africa’s decarbonisation, while reshaping its society in a manner that replaces rights-based claims with market ‘realities’ (see Cock 2012a; Death 2014). The JETP’s consultation process mirrors other ‘good’ and ‘green’ government consultations that supposedly create legitimacy through stakeholder engagement (Fraser 2006). However, South Africa’s influential civil society is likely more able to obtain some concessions in exchange for this legitimisation. It is beyond the scope of this article to comment on the efficacy of the JETP, and in the context of the 1–1.5 gigatons of carbon emissions it claims to prevent, it is possibly a ‘useful neoliberalism’ of the type famously described by Ferguson (2010). However, it is important to acknowledge the significant departure from the more radical Just Transition rhetorically aspired to by South Africa’s government, unions and civil society. It is also important to consider how the specifics of the consultation process have impeded these more radical claims.

In describing the stakeholder engagement spaces of the PCC, this article has detailed constraints to a genuine reshaping of the JETP. In particular, it has focused the interplay between a professional class, who use multistakeholder spaces to demand specific policy changes, rights-based organisations, whose questions are ‘heard’ but left outside of discussions and CSOs built through the funding mechanisms of stakeholder consultation, who are structurally incentivised to encourage further engagement. While each of these organisations was staffed by organic, local, actors with a passion for their community, the combination of their concerns created enthusiastic engagement within the confines of donor- and capital-driven development. In contrast, unionists’ objections, which centred upon the illegitimacy of these national- and international justices, pushed for a vision of material consumption—linked to a classed narrative of justice—that was incompatible with current climate action.

The tensions between union and civil society approaches to justice may not be unsurmountable. However, they are important to foreground for the JETP and for union-civil society alliances more generally. In both supposedly universal and explicitly identarian claims, NGOs and unions obfuscated criticisms of the power dynamics involved in shaping the transition, and encouraged a minimalist transition against the professed interests of both parties. More broadly, while advocates call for a non-identarian social justice, these calls are often softly identarian, with identities like ‘local’ privileged but workplace-based identities marginalised. Yet worker identities are crucial to the mobilisations that make unions unique among civil society actors; more importantly, meanings of social justice emerge from identities and experiences, including the experience of work.