Powering sub-Saharan Africa’s urban revolution: An energy transitions approach

This paper develops a geographic understanding of urban energy transitions in subSaharan African towns and cities. In doing so this paper seeks to critically reflect on the value and limits of urban transitions analysis as a framework for understanding energy networks beyond the largely integrated systems across the Global North. We explore how these potentials and deficits can be addressed by examining promising developments across a series of debates in urban studies that can help sensitise this approach to energyscapes in the African context. By reviewing urban transi- tions analysis through these debates the paper offers four important contributions to expand existing ways of understanding energy transition. These include the particular urbanisation dynamics of African towns ands cities, the need to locate the urban across energy regimes, the agencies of various intermediaries and urban actors and the contested politics inherent in the governing of energy networks. In the conclusion we reflect on the specific directions that have emerged from the paper in relation to our contributions, offering a geographically informed framework that allows us to better examine the challenges and specificities of transition across these rapidly growing urban regions

On handling urban informality in southern Africa

In this article I reconsider the handling of urban informality by urban planning and management systems in southern Africa. I argue that authorities have a fetish about formality and that this is fuelled by an obsession with urban modernity. I stress that the desired city, largely inspired by Western notions of modernity, has not been and cannot be realized. Using illustrative cases of top–down interventions, I highlight and interrogate three strategies that authorities have deployed to handle informality in an effort to create or defend the modern city. I suggest that the fetish is built upon a desire for an urban modernity based on a concept of formal order that the authorities believe cannot coexist with the “disorder” and spatial “unruliness” of informality. I question the authorities' conviction that informality is an abomination that needs to be “converted”, dislocated or annihilated. I conclude that the very configuration of urban governance and socio-economic systems in the region, like the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, renders informality inevitable and its eradication impossible

Climate justice and the international regime: before, during and after Paris

With a focus on key themes and debates, this article aims to illustrate and assess how the interaction between justice and politics has shaped the international regime and defined the nature of the international agreement that was signed in COP21 Paris. The work demonstrates that despite the rise of neo-conservatism and self-interested power politics, questions of global distributive justice remain a central aspect of the international politics of climate change. However, while it is relatively easy to demonstrate that international climate politics is not beyond the reach of moral contestations, the assessment of exactly how much impact justice has on climate policies and the broader normative structures of the climate governance regime remains a very difficult task. As the world digests the Paris Agreement, it is vital that the current state of justice issues within the international climate change regime is comprehensively understood by scholars of climate justice and by academics and practitioners, not least because how these intractable issues of justice are dealt with (or not) will be a crucial factor in determining the effectiveness of the emerging climate regime

The business of rapid transition

In a context of climate emergency and calls from the IPCC for “transformative systemic change,” we need to revisit the role of business in helping to accelerate responses to climate crisis. The scale and depth of the challenges facing business have intensified in ways which force us to refocus our research on questions of urgency and speed, as well as the growing need for new and alternative business models and a fundamental re‐balancing of the economy. There is a large literature dealing with business responses to climate change from a range of perspectives and disciplines covering issues such as corporate strategy and public policy engagement. But I argue that the question of the nature and speed of change now required, and whether there are historical and contemporary precedents for accelerated transitions within and beyond business, must assume a more central place in our research. This must be alongside growing efforts to understand how business will adapt to climate chaos. This conclusion implies a closer engagement and cross‐fertilization of ideas with scholars of sustainability transitions, for example. Here, there is growing interest in the question of how to accelerate transitions, but where greater attention is required to the role of business actors

How did we do that? Histories and political economies of rapid and just transitions

It is becoming increasingly clear that deep and rapid transitions in technologies, infrastructures and ways of organising the economy are imperative if we are to live safely within planetary boundaries. But what historical precedents are there for such profound shifts within short spaces of time, and what were the enabling conditions? When have transitions in sectors such as energy, food, finance and transport come about before, and how would they be brought about again? Do these episodes shed any analogous light on our current collective predicament? This paper develops an account of the politics and prospects of deeper transitions towards sustainability based on a critical empirical, but theoretically informed, reading of previous socio-technical transitions. The scale and urgency of our current ecological predicament is daunting and can be disempowering in the absence of strategic thinking about when analogous challenges have been encountered before and how societies have sought to overcome them. Providing a combination of concrete empirical examples drawn both from academic literature and a series of public workshops reflecting on these themes, this paper seeks to provide a basis for understanding as well as engaging with the scope for accelerated transitions within and beyond capitalism

Commoning mobility:Towards a new politics of mobility transitions

Scholars have argued that transitions to more sustainable and just mobilities require moving beyond technocentrism to rethink the very meaning of mobility in cities, communities, and societies. This paper demonstrates that such rethinking is inherently political. In particular, we focus on recent theorisations of commoning practices that have gained traction in geographic literatures. Drawing on our global comparative research of low‐carbon mobility transitions, we argue that critical mobilities scholars can rethink and expand the understanding of mobility through engagement with commons–enclosure thinking. We present a new concept, “commoning mobility,” a theorisation that both envisions and shapes practices that develop fairer and greener mobilities and more inclusive, collaboratively governed societies. Our analysis introduces three “logics” of mobility transition projects. First, the paper discusses how a logic of scarcity has been a driver for mobility planning as the scarcity of oil, finance, space, and time are invoked across the world as stimuli for aspiring to greener, “smarter,” and cheaper mobilities. The paper then identifies two responses to the logic of scarcity: the logics of austerity and the logics of commoning. Austere mobilities are examined to problematise the distribution of responsibility for emissions and ensuing injustices and exclusion in low‐carbon transitions. The logics of commoning shows a potential to reassess mobility not only as an individual freedom but also as a collective good, paving the way for fairer mobility transitions and a collaborative tackling of sustainable mobility challenges.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Re-conceptualising VET: responses to covid-19

The paper addresses the impact of Covid-19 on vocational education and training, seeking to discern the outline of possible directions for its future development within the debates about VET responses to the pandemic. The discussion is set in its socio-economic context, considering debates that engage with the social relations of care and neo-liberalism. The paper analyses discourses that have developed around VET across the world during the pandemic, illustrating both possible continuities and ruptures that may emerge in this field, as the health crisis becomes overshadowed in public policy by the prioritisation of economic recovery and social restoration. The paper concludes that, alongside the possibility of a narrowing of VET to its most prosaic aims and practices, the health crisis could also lead to a re-conceptualisation that develops its radical and emancipatory possibilities in both the global south and north.N/

The Bantustan State and the South African Transition: Militarisation, Patrimonialism and the Collapse of the Ciskei Regime, 1986-1994

This article examines the Ciskei bantustan and processes of state formation during the transition to democracy. In the Ciskei, the rule of Brigadier Gqozo rested on the continued support of the South African state: identified as the weakest link in the National Party’s conservative alliance, the Ciskei became the first target for the African National Congress’ mass action campaign of 1992. The struggle in the Ciskei thus had some significance for the shape of the transition. While at a constitutional level the National Party eventually conceded to the re-incorporation of the bantustans in late 1992, it continued to stall change and to bolster the bantustans through covert military operations and land transfers to bantustan elites. These dynamics of state formation are critical aspects of the history of the transition and were at the heart of the emerging political conflict in the Ciskei, which by mid-1992 was escalating into civil war. This article examines mass mobilisation, political repression and the consequences of the patrimonial militarisation of the Ciskei state in the Ciskei/ Border region. By focusing on processes of state formation and struggles over the fabric of the state, this article provides a corrective to the prevailing academic focus on the elite negotiations and argues for the value of social histories of the bantustan states for understanding the enduring legacies of these regimes