Nearly 775 million people around the globe are estimated to have no access to electricity. In 2022, that number rose for the first time since the International Energy Agency (IEA) began tracking it. Most of the increase occurred in African states, where about 600 million people currently lack access.[i] The IEA and Kenyan president William Ruto observed that the need for investment in Africa to expand access to electricity poses an opportunity to develop Africa’s fledgling renewables sector,[ii]which accounts for less than 2 percent of global capital pouring into clean energy despite an extraordinary level of renewable sources on the continent.[iii] Of the world’s best solar resources, for instance, 60 percent are estimated to be in Africa, but only 1 percent of the world’s solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity has been installed there.[iv]
Public and private energy finance to Africa from countries in the Group of Twenty (G20) and multilateral development banks (MDBs) from 2012 to 2021 totaled $345.76 billion, according to this paper’s findings. Amounting to an average of about $35 billion per year, this finance was within the estimated $31.5–$45 billion range necessary to address Africa’s annual energy finance gap. However, it was distributed unevenly, with ten countries receiving 77 percent of all finance over the ten-year period. Some inequity may be a consequence of differing domestic energy demands, investment environments, or natural resource endowments across countries. However, the resulting distribution of energy finance over the past decade was such that many African countries—home to hundreds of millions of people—were left with substantial gaps in their financing necessities. This paper also shows that only a few countries and multilateral financing entities—including China, France, Italy, the United States, and the World Bank Group—supplied the majority of energy finance to Africa between 2012 and 2021. In many ways, this finding is unsurprising; however, it serves as a reminder that significant amounts of energy finance are subject to the policies and priorities of a small number of countries and institutions. To that point, this paper demonstrates a near total retrenchment of funding for coal projects beginning around 2018, reflecting the policy priority among these major funders to stop financing overseas coal projects.
More ambitious and stringent policy intervention is required to accelerate the transition to renewable energy technologies. The ratcheting-up of policy ambition hinges on the political feasibility of policy change. Positive policy feedback can, in theory, enhance the political feasibility of ratcheting-up by creating pro-change constituencies and policy learning. To analyze the empirical mechanisms through which policy feedback operates, in this study, we analyze two energy policy instruments in South Africa. We examine how the Renewable Energy Independent Power Procurement Program (REIPPP), a renewable energy auction program for niche support, affected the re-design of the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), a central energy planning instrument. We use a qualitative case study approach, drawing on a large dataset of policy documents, public consultation responses and expert interviews. We show that REIPPP, through mechanisms of largely positive interpretive and resource feedback, has increased the political feasibility of more ambitious, pro-renewable energy planning in IRP. Our case thus demonstrates positive political feedback from the market creation to the central planning policy instrument. The findings suggest that the temporal sequencing of (re-designing) policy instruments can, under certain conditions, enable dynamic ratcheting up of energy policy mixes and thus sow the seeds for major policy change.
Nigeria, at the 2021 Conference of Parties (COP26) meeting in Glasgow announced a commitment to transitioning her carbon economy to reach net-zero by 2060. One year after, the country’s drive for carbon neutrality is shrouded with uncertainties despite numerous policies targeted at it. This study employed the Multilevel Perspective (MLP) and PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental) analytical framework to assess the politics of low-carbon transition in Nigeria. We used a triangulation of literature review, document analysis, and survey to build the theoretical, historical, and empirical bases for the enquiry. The findings show that the current low-carbon transition process is characterised by few potential drivers and many barriers with critical uncertainty effects. The key drivers are: Nigeria’s potentials for carbon sink/nature-based solutions; vast renewable energy resources; strong niche market demand; and huge opportunities for employment in the renewable energy sector. The major barriers are: poor management of the energy regime; weak infrastructural base; dependence on global climate fund; fossil fuel-based economy; cost of renewable energy options; and impacts of climate change, among others. The barriers with critical impacts outweigh the potential drivers at the ratio of 4:1 thereby playing greater role in characterizing Nigeria’s transition pathway as the ‘reconfiguration transition pathway’ within the ‘emergent transformation context.’ Therefore, unless the identified regime barriers are eliminated, the current transition pathway may not deliver the low-carbon targets. Considering the huge mitigation potentials of Nigeria’s vast forests and natural ecosystem for carbon sink, the study recommends investment in nature-based solutions in synergy with energy system management as the most convenient and cost-effective pathway to attaining carbon neutrality by 2060.
As regards the question whether natural resource affluence is a benediction or curse to sustainable development, the jury's verdict is still awaited. While we impatiently await the jury's verdict, this study provides empirical evidence that Mother Nature is responsible for Africa's predicaments with regard to economic development and environmental sustainability. Specifically, the system GMM estimates from 37 African economies reveal that: (i) natural resource affluence inhibits economic development, (ii) resource rents exacerbates carbon emissions thereby impeding environmental sustainability (iii) natural resource rents interacts with governance to produce negative synergy effects on economic growth and environmental pollution, (iv) resource rents interacts with ICT to produce respective positive net effects and negative synergy effects on economic growth and pollution emissions, (v) while non-renewable energy consumption inhibits economic growth and exacerbates pollution emissions, renewable energy consumption promotes environmental protection, (vi) we provide evidence of the U-shaped and inverted N-shaped EKC for natural resources, while also validating the inverted U-shaped EKC hypothesis relating to the nexus between per capita GDP and pollution emissions. Contingent on these findings, African countries can break the chains of the resource curse by designing sound and complementary policies upon attainment of the established thresholds by the policy modulating variables. Equally, various governments should strengthen governance quality and encourage digitalisation of the resource sector. Furthermore, African governments should propel the energy transition process by increasing investments in alternative clean energy sources in order to catalyse the attainment of the continent's Agenda 2063.
Critical to the trajectory and outcome of urban sustainable energy transitions is the ability of government institutions to foster conditions for change and innovation. In this paper, a theoretical perspective combining state power and local governance capability is used as a lens to examine the transition of the energy system in South Africa based on semi-structured interviews with a range of relevant stakeholders, supplemented by analysis of published academic and policy literature. The discussion highlights uneven transitional pathways across the country caused by variations in ‘capability’, together with continuing conflicting interests within the system which require more politically-informed policy processes.
Despite the growing invocation of transparency norms as the panacea for addressing the challenges associated with natural resource wealth, there is considerable ambiguity about how they shape market regimes in the global south. Drawing from empirical insights on government-donor engagements around the ExtractiveIndustries Transparency Initiative (EITI) that were pieced together from multiple rounds of fieldwork in Ghana between 2012 and2016, this article recounts the distinctive ways that such ambiguities around transparency reforms work to deepen the logics and mechanics of global capital in the extractive sector, with substantial gaps in labour market protections and domestic ownership. The author argues that the EITI’s successes in this endeavour reflect a more structural dynamic that is tied to donors’ parallel role as intermediaries of extractive governance norms and brokers of a distinctive form of stakeholder capitalism. Thisobservation underlines changes in the global architecture foraiding the expansion of Western capital by forging expandednetworks that preclude alternatives to neoliberalism
South Sudan has immense economic potential in its natural resource wealth, such as oil. Nevertheless, the resources have not been utilised towards development. Instead, it has experienced resource conflicts that compromise the continent's peace and security. This paper evaluates the role of citizen participation in natural resource governance in South Sudan and its impacts on oil governance. The paper hypothesises that citizen participation is critical in natural resource governance and a vital tool for promoting peace and security in societies. It argues from the perspective of natural resource conflicts and governance. It asserts that citizen participation addresses negative aspects such as corruption, lack of transparency and accountability, gender discrimination, and ethnic polarisation. It argues that there is a great need to enhance structures that support citizen participation towards effective governance of resources and, hence, sustainable peace. The paper adopted the mixed-methods research methodology.
Critical to the trajectory and outcome of urban sustainable energy transitions is the ability of government institutions to foster conditions for change and innovation. In this paper, a theoretical perspective combining state power and local governance capability is used as a lens to examine the transition of the energy system in South Africa based on semi-structured interviews with a range of relevant stakeholders, supplemented by analysis of published academic and policy literature. The discussion highlights uneven transitional pathways across the country caused by variations in ‘capability’, together with continuing conflicting interests within the system which require more politically-informed policy processes.
This paper introduces a special issue titled ‘Governing African Oil and Gas: Boom-Era Political and Institutional Innovation’. The special issue comprises 11 papers which investigate political and institutional innovation during the continent's 2004–2014 boom period. This is explored across state and non-state actors and in the local, national and transnational realms to chart creative engagements with the opportunities and constraints afforded by the resource boom. The special issue covers changes in regulatory frameworks, civil society mobilization, institutional goals and corporate policy. This introductory paper interrogates the major themes covered in this special issue and simultaneously introduces each of the 11 papers that follow.
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