By Aliness P. Mumba, Country Manager – Zambia | Climate Justice and Natural Resource Governance Lead, Southern Africa Trust
The energy transition is happening, but is it just?
Despite the language of inclusion now embedded in climate and energy discourse, many transition processes remain fundamentally top‑down. Communities are consulted, but rarely centred. Their realities are acknowledged but not consistently reflected in decisions. Participation is visible, but influence remains limited.
In this context, a just transition cannot be reduced to participation alone. It requires a deliberate redistribution of power, towards communities, towards those most affected, and towards systems that are accountable to them.
Inclusion and power relations
It is within this context that digital transformation is becoming increasingly important. However, it is often misunderstood as simply the adoption of new tools or technologies. In reality, it represents a broader shift in how organisations operate, communicate and engage. For the philanthropy sector, this shift is not only technical but strategic, requiring a rethinking of how relationships are built, how decisions are made, and how impact is delivered and shared.
Traditionally, philanthropy in South Africa has operated through structured, intermediary-driven models, where funders allocate resources, organisations implement programmes, and outcomes are reported back through formal processes. While this approach has enabled accountability, it has also contributed to a sense of distance between funders and grant makers, nonprofits that implement, and communities that benefit from funding. This distance can limit responsiveness, reduce opportunities for collaboration and reinforce perceptions of philanthropy as top-down.
The risk of repeating extractive patterns and exclusion
Extractive industries have long shaped Southern Africa’s economies and livelihoods, while also entrenching inequality, environmental harm, and exclusion. As global demand for critical minerals accelerates, there is a real risk that these same governance failures will be reproduced under the banner of “green minerals.”
At spaces such as the Alternative Mining Indaba, which the Southern Africa Trust has consistently engaged in alongside community and civil society partners, concerns are repeatedly raised around opaque contracting processes, limited community consent, and weak accountability in extractives governance. These are not abstract debates: communities are already experiencing displacement, water pollution, land loss, and livelihood disruption linked to mining activities framed as part of the green economy. A just transition cannot co-exist with unjust extractive systems; it must actively confront and reshape them.
Communities need real inclusion
Importantly, what communities are resisting is not transition itself, but exclusion from shaping it. Across Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, and Mozambique, Southern Africa Trust‑supported partnerships with over 50 local Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) have strengthened community organising processes that move beyond consultation.
In Zimbabwe, sustained engagement with organisations connected to the Alternative Mining Indaba has helped build confidence among communities, particularly women in mining‑affected areas, to engage directly with government and corporate actors and demand accountability. These processes demonstrate that when communities are supported to organise, share evidence, and act collectively, they begin to influence outcomes. However, these gains remain uneven and fragile, constrained by opaque governance systems, environmental degradation, gender‑based violence, and limited economic inclusion. The critical question, therefore, is not whether participation works, but whether it is supported at scale and sustained over time.
Deliberate youth leadership support
One of the clearest shifts in the just transition narrative is emerging through youth leadership, and the Southern African Trust has intentionally supported youth‑led processes as core interventions rather than symbolic inclusion. Through initiatives such as the Trust’s 2025 inaugural DARIRO: Civic Futures Roundtable Series, youth and civic actors were supported with foresight tools, analysis, and solidarity networks to navigate increasingly contested civic spaces.
Building on this momentum, The Trust collaborated with youth networks and civil society partners at the 2026 Alternative Mining Indaba to support a regional youth convening focused on collective analysis, agenda‑setting, and coordinated advocacy. This process led to foresight‑driven planning, the ignition of a Youth Just Transition Movement, and the articulation of policy and advocacy priorities centred on equity, accountability, and intergenerational justice.
What stands out is not simply youth participation, but the clarity of their positioning. Young people are no longer asking to be included; they are asserting their role as co‑creators of transition pathways. Yet this leadership remains severely under‑resourced, and for the transition to be sustainable, youth leadership must be recognised, financed, and embedded within formal decision‑making systems.
Evidence, voice, and whose knowledge counts
A persistent challenge in climate and energy governance is the disconnect between policy frameworks and lived reality. Initiatives such as the Shaping Inclusive Transitions Initiative, implemented in collaboration with the African Centre for Green Economy (AfriCGE), have created platforms for communities, civil society organisations, and researchers to generate locally grounded evidence that can inform policy and decision‑making.
At forums such as the Alternative Mining Indaba, storytelling initiatives have enabled participants to document shared experiences across countries, displacement without fair compensation, polluted water sources, and weak state and corporate accountability. These narratives go beyond amplifying voice; they expose patterns of systemic governance failure and elevate lived experience as a legitimate form of knowledge. For transitions to be meaningful, they must be informed not only by models and metrics, but by lived realities.
From loss to opportunity through funding flows
Transitions are embraced when they create real and visible economic pathways. In South Africa’s Mpumalanga region, dialogues through the Shaping Inclusive Transitions Initiative, bringing together labour unions, environmental justice organisations, and community groups, have underscored the urgency of reskilling, social protection, and support for new forms of local economic activity as coal declines.
These engagements reflect a broader regional reality: a just transition is not only about shifting energy systems, but about securing livelihoods. Without viable alternatives, such as green enterprise development, local value addition, or diversified income opportunities, transitions risk being experienced as loss rather than opportunity, particularly in already precarious communities.
This is where finance becomes a decisive expression of power: how transition finance is designed and deployed shapes who can participate in, influence, and benefit from emerging pathways. Through regional engagements and partnerships, the Southern Africa Trust has contributed to reframing transition finance toward community‑driven, institution‑strengthening models, recognising that who benefits from the just transition depends not only on policy intent, but on where finance flows, and to whom.
Our unique context and shared lessons
South Africa’s just transition is shaped by distinctive conditions, its scale of industrialisation, reliance on coal, organised labour dynamics, and access to large‑scale international transition finance, creating both heightened risk and opportunity, particularly in regions such as Mpumalanga. At the same time, the deeper drivers of contestation around the transition, community exclusion, inequitable benefit‑sharing, youth marginalisation, and weak accountability in resource governance, mirror experiences across Southern Africa and the continent.
This creates scope for cross‑regional learning: community organising and extractives accountability practices from countries such as Zambia and Zimbabwe offer insights for South Africa, while South Africa’s experience navigating labour transitions and climate finance provides lessons for other countries pursuing just transition pathways. The challenge is not replication, but adaptation, grounding transition strategies in local realities while drawing on shared regional experience.
From participation to influence
The language of inclusion is now firmly embedded in climate and energy discourse. The challenge lies in moving beyond it. What is required is a shift from participation to influence, from engaging communities as stakeholders to recognising them as actors with the power to shape outcomes.
This requires investing in community organising, strengthening local institutions, supporting youth and feminist leadership, and building systems that connect lived realities to policy and investment decisions. It also demands confronting an uncomfortable reality: systems of governance, finance, and extraction are not neutral. Without deliberate intervention, they will continue to reproduce inequality, even under the banner of a “just” transition.
How change happens defines the defines the transition
Just transitions are often framed in technical terms, energy mixes, financing mechanisms, and policy instruments, but at their core, they are about people.
Across Southern Africa, communities, supported by local CSOs and regional partnerships, are already demonstrating what a just transition can look like: grounded in lived realities, driven by collective agency, and connected to broader struggles for economic, gender, and social justice. The question is whether systems will shift to meet them or continue to move ahead without them. For the Southern Africa Trust, this challenge sits at the heart of the SERITI Strategy (2024–2030), which prioritises community agency, youth and feminist leadership, locally grounded evidence, and its translation into policy influence.
Ultimately, a just transition is not only about what changes, but how change happens, and who gets to shape it. Without addressing this directly, the transition risks reproducing the very inequalities it seeks to overcome. The work ahead, therefore, is not only to support transition, but to reshape it, around equity, accountability, and shared prosperity.