South Africa’s Just Transition: Billions Pledged, Communities Still Waiting

Unless these commitments translate into tangible benefits for marginalised communities facing poverty, unemployment, and deep structural inequality, the Just Transition risks becoming little more than a rebranding exercise for exclusion.

The 2026 South Africa Investment Conference, alongside inaugural investment events in Gauteng and the Northern Cape, showcased optimism from global investors and policymakers. The numbers were impressive. The intent was stated clearly. But in townships like Tembisa and mining towns like eMalahleni, residents face an uncomfortable and familiar reality: investment announcements rarely reach those most affected by economic transformation.

The Implementation Gap

More than five years have passed since South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission was established in December 2020, and the record on implementation is difficult to defend. A groundWork report found that while climate policy frameworks exist on paper, entrenched fossil-fuel interests and weak execution are leaving communities behind. The PCC’s evidence-based advice on South Africa’s 2025 climate pledges was largely ignored by government, resulting in unambitious targets that do little to reduce emissions or redirect resources toward those who need them most.

This pattern repeats across investment cycles. Projects are announced with fanfare, yet rollout happens quietly, behind closed doors, and with minimal transparency. Communities remain excluded from decision-making. Procurement processes lack clarity. Local participation is treated as a compliance checkbox rather than a design principle. Skills development, when it appears at all, becomes an afterthought bolted onto projects conceived without local input.

The financing structure compounds these concerns. Many large-scale investments, particularly in infrastructure and energy, are financed through debt. While short-term growth may result, the repayment burden falls on taxpayers who see little direct benefit from the projects being built. Development financed through expensive loans, without corresponding mechanisms for local wealth creation, risks deepening inequality rather than alleviating it.

Justice Must Be Central, Not Peripheral

South Africa’s energy transition sits at the heart of its climate commitments and Nationally Determined Contributions. Renewable energy investment is increasing, and the direction of travel is clear. Yet the critical question remains unanswered: will these projects deliver justice, or will they simply replace one form of exclusion with another?

For coal-dependent regions like Mpumalanga, the transition is not a policy abstraction. It is immediate and personal. Jobs are being lost. Local economies are contracting. Social fabrics are under strain. Renewable energy projects developed without integrating local labour, local ownership, and local skills development risk becoming enclaves of opportunity surrounded by communities that derive no benefit from them.

A credible Just Transition rests on three principles. Procedural justice demands that affected communities are included in decision-making from the outset, not consulted after plans are finalised. Distributive justice requires that benefits, jobs, and ownership are shared equitably, not concentrated among established corporate players. Restorative justice calls for active measures to address the historical inequalities that shaped the communities now bearing the costs of transition.

What Must Change

For marginalised communities to access the opportunities that investment conferences promise, several structural shifts are essential. Supply chains must be localised so that procurement spending circulates within affected regions rather than flowing to established contractors elsewhere. Skills programmes must be aligned with future industries and delivered ahead of project timelines, not retrofitted after construction is complete. Information about investment projects, procurement processes, and employment opportunities must be made genuinely accessible — not buried in government gazettes or corporate sustainability reports.

Above all, accountability mechanisms must carry real consequence. Investors should demand transparency on local employment outcomes, labour-intensive project design, and genuine community participation as conditions of deployment — not as aspirational annexes to term sheets.

The 2026 investment cycle should be measured not by the billions pledged but by whether those pledges reach the people and places the transition is supposed to serve. Without that standard, South Africa’s investment conferences will continue to generate impressive headline numbers while the communities at the sharp end of economic transformation remain exactly where they were before the speeches began.

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