7 July 2026
On 25 June, on the margins of the International Energy Workshop in Cape Town, the RESET Network and SAPEM co-hosted an evening on just energy transitions at STIAS in Stellenbosch. The aim was to complement IEW’s technical agenda with the questions that decide whether a transition is genuinely just: political economy, finance, labor, and equity. Luis Fernández Intriago co-organized and moderated the evening and presented on RESET and the just transition. It brought together around 18 researchers and practitioners from across Africa and beyond, spanning several African energy and climate networks (including African Energy Futures, CCG, Re-Integrate, and EfD) alongside modelers, government, and consultancy partners. Across short talks and facilitated table discussions, one theme surfaced repeatedly: a useful African research agenda should start from the questions local researchers care about, not from a particular model or tool. Participants pointed to a field crowded with modeling platforms but comparatively thin on shared, context-specific questions, and to the risk that justice and equity are treated as afterthoughts rather than built into analysis from the start.
Two directions drew the most energy. The first is making justice and equity Africa-centric and measurable inside energy and economic models, where framings imported from high-income settings fit African realities of energy access, affordability, and informality poorly. The second is the macroeconomic and financial dimension of just transitions: how financing choices shape fiscal space, external balances, labor markets, and distribution.
The RESET Network sees its role as additive rather than duplicative: convening Global South researchers around shared questions, supporting locally led analysis, and helping turn it into work that reaches decision-makers. The Stellenbosch conversation is a starting point for shaping working groups with an African focus, and we will follow up with those who took part.
Some questions that surfaced from the discussion:
1. Africa-centric justice and equity metrics for energy-economy models. The clearest gap in the room, and one the recent justice-in-modeling literature confirms is under-developed.
- What does a defensible, Africa-relevant justice metric look like when the binding concerns are basic access and affordability rather than the distributional framings built for high-income systems?
- Which existing indicators (energy burden, access, informality-adjusted measures) can be operationalized inside energy-system and economy-wide models, and which require new construction?
- Can a shared, open indicator set be maintained across country teams so results are comparable without erasing context?
2. Macro and finance of just transitions.
- How do alternative financing schemes for the transition (carbon-pricing revenue, concessional capital, JETPs, blended finance) differ in their effects on fiscal space, public debt, the exchange rate, and the balance of payments?
- Under what conditions does carbon-pricing revenue recycling deliver a double dividend in economies with large informal sectors and thin tax bases, and who bears the incidence?
- What macro-financial preconditions determine whether transition finance actually reaches affected workers and communities rather than developers?
3. Labor markets and distribution.
- How do the five just-labor-transition challenges play out specifically in African coal regions (for example Mpumalanga), and how do they compare with coal-dependent regions in India?
- How should informality (roughly 85% of SSA employment) change the design of reskilling, social protection, and place-based measures, and how can it be represented in models rather than assumed away?
- What labor-market and distributional outcomes are systematically invisible in current models, and what data or methods would make them visible?
4. Development-versus-decarbonization modeling. The Dioha and Mutiso critique, reframed as a research program.
- How much do standard GDP-and-informality assumptions bias African energy-demand and emissions projections, and what does correcting them do to optimal pathways and investment needs?
- What would an economy-wide model that optimizes for development goals under a carbon constraint, rather than for decarbonization alone, actually recommend differently?
- How should the cost of capital be disaggregated across African markets so transition costs, and climate-finance needs, are not systematically understated?
5. Data and method. The shared enabling layer.
- What proxy and validation strategies let teams work credibly where official statistics are thin, and can these be standardized across the network?
- How do we connect modelers to the “right questions” so tools serve inquiry rather than the reverse, as several participants argued?