Institutionalising decarbonisation in South Africa: Navigating climate mitigation and socio-economic transformation

The article investigates the outcomes of climate institutional governance in South Africa’s energy sector as well as examining the evolutionary path of this institutional form, tracing path dependencies and critical junctures. The article begins with a description of three key governance challenges for any climate institutions and sketch how the South African context may modify how they are approached.

Key Findings/Recommendations: Although the South Africa’s climate-orientated institutions had a promising start, they have never managed to develop much influence over the country’s overwhelmingly dominant emitting sector: energy, based on coal. South Africa steadily created climate institutions up to 2011 but failed to have an influence in the energy sector due to South Africa’s political economy of energy, which gave powerful actors the sustained ability to block meaningful institutionalisation of decarbonisation in the energy sector. As a result, South Africa’s climate institutions play few of the roles expected for successful institutionalization of climate action, with energy institutions instead playing a shadow climate governance role.

Read online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/09644016.2021.1947635?needAccess=true