South Africa’s unjust climate reparations: a critique of the Just Energy Transition Partnership

SUMMARY

This briefing critically discusses the moral question of whether South Africa deserves climate reparations. It examines the deeply unequal and polluting nature of the South African economy in order to demonstrate how claims from South Africa for climate finance and reparations are morally complex and fraught. For South Africa’s claims for climate reparations and finance to be justified, the article proposes two conditions. First, that South Africa act in line with its fair share of global climate action. Second, that climate finance must help to transform South Africa’s deeply unjust society and bring benefits not to the rich elite, who themselves owe climate reparations, but to the majority, especially the poor, Black and working class.

Applying these two principles, the briefing asks whether the Just Energy Transition (JET) Partnership and the accompanying Investment Plan announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa meet those conditions. It argues that they potentially fail to meet both. The piece also warns that global South countries must be critical of JET Partnership funding models, as they may be used as tools to entrench the interests of international financiers who seek to dominate the clean energy future. To counteract such a possibility, climate justice movements should work to ensure that climate finance is a true fulfilment of climate debt owed to the global South, which works to ensure meaningful social, economic and ecological justice.

The author writes this piece not just from an academic perspective as a postdoctoral research fellow. He also writes it from his perspective as the elected General Secretary of the South African Climate Justice Coalition – a coalition of over 50 trade union, grassroots, community-based and non-profit organisations working together to advance a transformative climate justice agenda. In his role as general secretary, he has engaged with coalition member organisations and worked to build a shared and critical activist agenda towards both the JET Partnership and the South African government’s response to the climate crisis more generally.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate justice
• international finance
• debt
• renewable energy
• social movements
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

As a scholar-activist, I am immersed in a movement filled with rich ideas, discussions and critiques. This piece owes much of its insights and thanks to the movement of which I am but a small part.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not affect the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Here I take the term morality to be describing a system or set of principles and values that are used to determine what should be considered right or wrong, just or unjust, fair or unfair. Conceptions of morality can help to determine what a just and fair society should look like and why we should condemn and rectify inequality, injustice and harms at a systemic, community and individual level. By way of further clarification, I am not talking about a descriptive version of morality that tries to describe what people happen to believe to be moral. Rather, it is a normative description of morality, which attempts to outline and prescribe what should be considered moral. Using normative morality, this paper is an exercise in applied ethics, drawing on particular moral principles to apply them to questions of climate justice.

2 More information about the Climate Justice Coalition is available at their website, climatejusticecoalition.org.

3 Such an approach to combining climate and colonial reparations as part of building a more just future coheres well with the constructive view of reparations put forward by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (2022) in Reconsidering Reparations. According to this view, reparations are ‘a historically informed view of distributive justice, serving a larger and broader worldmaking project. Reparation, like the broader struggle for social justice, is concerned with building the just world to come’.

4 The ANC driving widespread privatisation may sound surprising to international readers who view the ANC historically as a left-leaning political party. However, it forms part of the ANC’s turn towards neoliberalism since 1996 and is part of a long-term process of privatisation of the energy sector, characterised by disaster capitalism, corruption and underfunding of the energy sector on the part of the state (Bond 2000; Lenferna 2022).

5 Concerns about the JET Investment Plan and green structural adjustment were expressed by several civil society actors at a workshop attended by the author. The workshop was on international finance institutions, hosted in June 2023 in Johannesburg by the Alternative Information and Development Centre and Institute for Economic Justice. These concerns have also been raised by members of Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (2023).

6 This is according to reports from trade union representatives in a workshop the author attended on the JET Partnership in March 2022 at the University of Johannesburg.

Additional information

Funding

Dr Lenferna’s work is based on the research supported by the National Institute for Humanities and the Social Sciences (NIHSS). Opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in any publication generated by the NIHSS-supported grant are those of the author, and the NIHSS accepts no liability in this regard. His work is also based on the research supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (NRF) (grant number 99188). Opinions, findings, conclusions and recommendations expressed in this work are those of the author alone and the NRF accepts no liability in this regard.

Notes on contributors

Alex Lenferna

Alex Lenferna is a post-doctoral research fellow at Nelson Mandela University; he is affiliated with the Department of Development Studies and under the Chair in Identities and Social Cohesion in Africa.