From ballot box to Just Energy Transition — participation without power

South Africa has developed a peculiar understanding of democracy in which the opportunity to participate is increasingly confused with the power to determine outcomes.

We have become extraordinarily proficient at the performance of democratic participation. Meetings are convened, stakeholders identified, consultations facilitated, attendance registers signed and reports produced, all demonstrating that people have been given an opportunity to express their views.

Yet the fundamental questions remain: who makes the decisions, who controls the resources, and who benefits?

This contradiction is embedded in our political system. Every five years, citizens are encouraged to vote for representatives who will govern on their behalf. Between elections, communities are invited to public hearings and consultations, but often possess little practical authority over decisions affecting their lives.

Now this very model is being reproduced within South Africa’s Just Energy Transition (JET), where the language of inclusion, participation and social justice has become central to an expanding institutional machinery that risks preserving the very inequalities of power the transition promises to overcome.

The Just Transition is reproducing a democratic model that has already confused participation with power.

The performance of participation

Our liberation struggle was animated by a different understanding of democracy. The declaration that the people shall govern was not intended simply to guarantee the right to periodically select political representatives. It envisaged ordinary people exercising meaningful influence over decisions governing their lives.

The street committees, area committees and civic structures that emerged during the struggle represented practical expressions of this aspiration, subsequently recognised in our constitutional commitment to participatory democracy.

Yet, three decades later, participation is increasingly measured by procedures rather than the distribution of power. An election is considered successful because citizens had an opportunity to vote. A consultation is celebrated because meetings were held and submissions received. Whether ordinary people influenced the decisions subsequently taken is treated as secondary.

As South Africa approaches the November municipal elections, the declining willingness of citizens to participate should serve as a warning about the legitimacy of this model. Turnout fell from 57.97% of registered voters in 2016 to just 45.86% in 2021. We cannot presume to know why every non-voter abstains, but we cannot ignore the possibility that millions increasingly see little value in a system that invites them to participate while leaving them powerless over the decisions governing their lives.

Rather than confronting this democratic deficit, the Just Energy Transition is reproducing precisely the same model: celebrating participation as evidence of inclusion while leaving the underlying concentration of political and economic power largely untouched.

Green power, old inequality

Our forthcoming report, Green Power, Old Inequality, examines how the renewable energy transition is reproducing the economic exclusion and concentrated power that have characterised South Africa’s mineral economy for generations.

South Africa’s JET Investment Plan identifies about R1.5-trillion in investment requirements between 2023 and 2027.

The Presidential Climate Commission (PCC), established to advance an inclusive transition, embraces procedural, distributive and restorative justice. Its framework invokes the principle that communities should participate in determining their development and livelihoods.

Yet this is precisely where the contradiction becomes apparent.

The PCC has positioned itself as a champion of participation while presiding, in its advisory and convening capacity, over a transition architecture that provides affected communities with no corresponding guarantee of meaningful decision-making authority.

It can convene consultations, facilitate dialogue and celebrate stakeholder consensus, but none of these activities establishes that communities exercise power over the economic arrangements determining their futures.

Across the emerging renewable energy economy, corporations, financiers and government institutions can negotiate ownership structures, financing arrangements, electricity purchasing agreements and anticipated economic benefits long before affected communities are notified.

As our report shows, by the time communities are invited to participate, fundamental commercial decisions have already been made, leaving little of substance open to negotiation for the communities who are meant to be its beneficiaries.

Communities are invited to participate only after those with economic and political power have largely determined what their future will look like. Consultation then becomes a mechanism for legitimising decisions already taken.

Our engagement with communities around renewable energy developments, including Sonvanger Solar in the Free State, has brought these contradictions into focus.

A renewable energy project can reduce emissions and be celebrated as a Just Energy Transition project, while reproducing the concentrated ownership and exclusion associated with the colonial apartheid extractive economy. The technology changes, but the relationships of power remain intact.

An industry built around consultation

Perhaps the most revealing feature of this model is the institutional economy developing around participation itself. Government institutions, international donors, development agencies, consultants, researchers and professional civil society organisations have established numerous programmes intended to facilitate community participation in the Just Transition.

The financial figures are revealing. Our investigation of the Just Energy Transition Project Management Unit’s grant registers identifies about R127-million in selected commitments towards civic engagement, civil society participation and stakeholder consultation.

This includes R87.9-million for civic engagement in Mpumalanga, about R38-million for an EU-funded Climate Change Champions programme involving professional civil society organisations, and R1.52-million for PCC stakeholder and community engagement.

The wider funding architecture is considerably larger. According to the JET Project Management Unit’s Progress Report Dashboard for the first quarter of 2026, about R2.46-billion, representing 80% of the committed value of Mpumalanga’s JET portfolio, was concentrated in community organisational development and capacity development or training.

These broader allocations are not exclusively consultation spending. Nor do these figures establish financial misuse. But they expose a fundamental question about what our transition institutions are financing, and to what end.

Substantial funding continues to flow through professional NGOs and intermediary organisations whose own research and experience have exposed the limitations of consultation without power. They know that communities can attend countless meetings without acquiring any meaningful influence over ownership, investment or development decisions. Yet these same organisations continue to participate in, facilitate and benefit institutionally from a system that presents consultation as evidence of democratic inclusion. 

This is where the deception is produced: the money intended to advance justice, finances an elaborate performance of participation that gives government, corporations and international funders the appearance of community legitimacy, while those communities remain excluded from the decisions that matter.

The concern is not simply that consultation fails to redistribute power, but that an increasingly well-funded consultation industry can help legitimise the very inequalities it claims to challenge.

The PCC’s multistakeholder model reflects this contradiction. Bringing government, business, labour and organised civil society together is presented as evidence of inclusion. But representation through selected institutional actors cannot substitute for the independent, organised participation of directly affected communities.

Nor can consensus among those seated at the institutional table be treated as evidence of community consent.

Participation has become something institutions can finance, facilitate, measure and report upon without necessarily surrendering the power that meaningful participation ought to confer.

An elaborate performance of inclusion can therefore coexist with continued exclusion.

Justice requires more than consultation

This is not an argument against renewable energy, consultation or representative democracy. It is an argument against confusing democratic procedures with democratic power.

Meaningful participation does not mean every community demand must prevail. But it requires information before decisions are settled, genuine opportunities to influence alternatives, transparent explanations and enforceable accountability.

More fundamentally, a just transition must confront the economic relationships through which ownership, investment decisions and benefits remain concentrated among powerful actors.

The PCC cannot claim democratic success merely because it has facilitated dialogue or promoted a framework promising justice. Its contribution must also be judged against the gap between those promises and the actual power exercised by affected communities.

Otherwise, South Africa risks mobilising enormous resources to transform its energy infrastructure while leaving the distribution of political and economic power largely untouched.

This is why the question extends beyond climate policy.

Representative democracy cannot survive without meaningful popular democracy. Institutions that continually invite participation without enabling people to exercise meaningful influence risk undermining their own legitimacy.

Our liberation struggle promised that the people shall govern, not that they shall be endlessly consulted while others govern on their behalf.

The test is not how many people were invited to participate, but how much power they possessed to influence what happened next.

Until that becomes the measure of justice, we risk building a greener economy upon the foundations of the same old inequality. DM

Macua’s forthcoming report, Green Power, Old Inequality, examines participation, ownership and accountability within South Africa’s Just Energy Transition.