When Green is Not Clean Enough: Are Africa's Energy Transition Plans Actually Just?
- Apr 29
- 4 min read
Imagine you wake up one morning to find that your farmland has been earmarked for a solar farm. Government officials assure you that the project has agreed to bring electricity, roads, and schools to your community. A decade passes but the roads never arrive, new schools remain a promise, and your replacement plot for farming is smaller, harder to reach, and far less fertile. Meanwhile, the solar farm hums along, generating clean energy celebrated in international climate reports.
This is the experience of many communities, from Kenya to Ghana, caught between the promise of a green future and the reality of a poorly managed energy transition.
The rush to go green
Across the world, governments aim to decarbonise their economies and demonstrate their commitment to goals of the Paris Agreement. In Sub-Saharan Africa, this has led to the formulation of Energy Transition and Investment Plans (ETIPs), outlining how countries intend to accelerate the deployment of clean energy. Ghana and Kenya, two of the continent's more prominent economies, have both developed such plans with support from Sustainable Energy for All (SEforAll), a UN clean energy agency.
On paper, both plans are impressive. Kenya aims to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, Ghana targets 2060. Both countries envision hundreds of thousands of new “green jobs”. Both invoke the language of equity and inclusion, yet, there is little knowledge on the extent to which these plans genuinely embody justice tenets.
Our recent research paper in Climate Policy answers a straightforward question: beyond the rhetoric, how just are these transition plans?
Justice is not just a buzzword
A just transition is not simply about switching from coal to solar, or from petrol to electric vehicles. It is about ensuring that the costs and benefits of that switch are shared fairly, and that the people most vulnerable to climate change are not also the ones who bear the heaviest (cost) burden of the transition itself.
Scholars and activists have identified four key dimensions of justice that any credible transition plan should address. Distributional justice asks who gets the benefits and who bears the risks. Procedural justice asks who has a seat at the table. Recognition justice asks whose identities and needs count. Restorative justice asks who is compensated for historical harm. When we analysed the ETIPs of Ghana and Kenya against these four dimensions, the results were telling.
What the plans get right, and what they miss
Both plans do acknowledge that the transition should create jobs and economic opportunity. Kenya projects 500,000 new jobs by 2050, Ghana, 400,000 by 2060. That is a genuine nod to distributional justice. But neither plan clearly addresses what happens to the workers who will lose jobs as oil, gas, and other fossil fuel industries wind down. Ghana's extractive sector employs thousands directly and indirectly, yet, the plan offers no concrete roadmap for managing those losses.
On stakeholder consultation, the two countries diverged sharply. Kenya's plan was developed through stakeholder engagement, led by local consultants and validated across ministries. This process arguably explains why the plan has since been integrated into the country's revised energy policy. Ghana's experience was the opposite: domestic expertise, including the Energy Commission, was largely sidelined in favour of international consultants, particularly from McKinsey, who led the modelling processes. The resulting plan was widely seen by Ghanaian energy experts as disconnected from Ghanaian realities.
Both plans, however, fell short on recognition and restorative justice. Women, persons with disabilities, indigenous communities, and the rural poor are barely visible in either document. And on the question of repairing historical environmental harm, specifically compensating communities already ravaged by climate variability, the plan is silent on any concrete measure.
The case of the Lake Turkana Wind Farm in northern Kenya drives home the significance of taking justice seriously in transition plans. Africa's largest wind energy project, constructed between 2014 and 2016, was celebrated globally as a clean energy triumph. But local Turkana communities faced land dispossession, limited consultation, and broken promises. Women, who bore the greatest livelihood impacts, were largely excluded from negotiations. Protests and legal battles followed. In 2014, the Kenyan Environment and Land Court eventually found that indigenous rights had been violated.
What needs to change?
Our research shows that transitions that reproduce patterns of exclusion and marginalisation are not truly just, regardless of what the emissions figures say. Policymakers in Ghana, Kenya, and across the continent need to do three things urgently to enhance just transitions.
First, broaden who is at the table, not just national ministries and international organisations, but local governments, women's groups, disability-led organisations, and community representatives.
Second, take political economy seriously, because understanding who holds power, who benefits from the status quo, and who is likely to resist change is not optional; it is necessary.
Third, embed accountability mechanisms from the start, not consultations used merely to secure a social license, but genuine grievance channels that communities can access long after the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Transition plans should be developed with countries and communities, not for them.
This blog is based on an open-access paper published in Climate Policy.
