Partnering in action
Case Studies
From mandate to momentum: local government at the heart of South Africa’s Just Transition
What does it take to move from policy on paper to action on the ground? In South Africa, where the effects of climate change are increasingly local – flooded streets, food insecurity and energy poverty – municipalities stand at the forefront of both challenge and opportunity.
This case study explores how nine provincial dialogues that brought together over 400 voices from municipalities, communities and civil society shifted the conversation about the Just Transition from confusion to action. It captures the lessons, relationships and readiness that emerged, and lays the groundwork for what’s next.
Suggested citation: Economic Development Partnership. 2025. From mandate to momentum: local government at the heart of South Africa’s Just Transition: a case study. Available: https://wcedp.co.za/impact-local-just-transition
Why local government matters in South Africa’s Just Transition
The effects of climate change are already being experienced at a local level. The stormwater systems that buckle under the pressure of increased rainfall. The drought-stricken farms subject to changing rainfall patterns. The overburdened service delivery departments scrambling to keep up with disasters and maintenance. The experience of the effects of climate change at the local level necessitates local action. But a common agenda is needed for collective action.
When the Economic Development Partnership (EDP) undertook the Local Just Transition (LJT) Dialogues project, many municipalities lacked clarity about what the Just Transition meant for their roles, planning and service delivery. With limited technical and financial capacity — and no clear roadmap for support — local governments were underprepared to meet rising demands from a changing climate.
As the Climate Change Act came into force and national policy advanced towards an ideal of a Just Transition, this project created a space where municipal leaders can engage deeply, reflect openly and learn together about what a local transition would look like in reality. The dialogues aimed to build shared understanding, surface local opportunities and constraints, and spark the long-term partnerships essential to successful implementation.
This case study details how the EDP created that space for dialogue, reflection and partnership and what our team learned in the process. This story draws on insights from across nine provinces about what local governments need to lead the Just Transition, what kind of support partners must provide and how collaboration rooted in local realities can drive meaningful, inclusive climate action.
Dialogues: more than just talk
The EDP uses ‘dialogue’ to refer to the creation of a structured, participatory mechanism that enables diverse stakeholders, including local government officials, traditional authorities, youth, civil society and business, to share their realities, voice concerns, reflect on opportunities and collaboratively envision how a new, potential reality can unfold in a specific context. Used appropriately, a dialogue achieves three objectives: it surfaces diverse lived experience, builds consensus and shapes actionable locally-relevant responses.
Designing dialogues that build shared understanding, relationships and readiness
Too often, dialogue is misunderstood as a one-directional flow of information. But, in this project, dialogue was designed as a dynamic space where knowledge could be exchanged and relationships could be seeded so that real partnerships can take root.
The LJT project convened nine provincial dialogues across South Africa, from coal-reliant Mpumalanga to coastal Eastern Cape, with a focus on inclusivity, relevance and action. Municipal officials, traditional authorities, youth leaders, community-based organisation, academia and private sector voices all came together to ask “How can we make the Just Transition real, here, in our context?”
Each dialogue was intentionally grounded in local realities. The panel discussions and industry-specific breakouts were not only about technical presentations. They were about building shared meaning, exposing barriers and co-designing opportunities specific to that province.
The key activities built into the project design were:
- Tailoring the provincial dialogues to reflect local dynamics in the panel discussions and industry-specific breakouts
- Developing discussion guides grounded in provincial environmental, economic, and social realities
- Capturing municipal and community perspectives on barriers, opportunities, and readiness to partner and lead the LJT
- Translating insights emerging from the dialogues to inform SALGA and partners’ national climate governance and COP30 preparations
- Consolidating findings into a national position paper embedding local priorities into guiding document for how to implement the LJT
The dialogues followed a three-phase, adaptive approach that prioritised local relevance and relationship-building.
Phase 1 – preparation:
Preparing for dialogues is not a one-size-fits-all process. For the LJT project, a flexible workshop framework was developed. This meant designing the framework to be adaptable to diverse provincial contexts — urban, rural, coal-reliant or coastal. The dialogues needed to reflect diverse ecological, economic and political dynamics. Using this framework, the dialogues were then co-designed with the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) and local partners. The purpose of the co-design was to ensure that the dialogues were relevant and fully owned by the SALGA Senior Provincial Advisors hosting them. Key to this phase was listening: desktop research, stakeholder mapping and gap analysis helped the EDP team understand each province’s entry points into the Just Transition; the intention was for partners to co-own these dialogues.
Phase 2 – delivery:
Between September 2024 to March 2025, the dialogues unfolded across nine provinces, engaging over 400 participants. Each dialogue offered a blend of technical panels and participatory group work. Discussions spanned technical and systemic issues, including green finance, spatial inequality, disaster risk, energy transition, informal work and the role of traditional leadership in the LJT. Breakouts reflected provincial strengths and concerns. For example, blue economy opportunities in the Eastern Cape and rooftop solar momentum in Limpopo.
The sessions technical and deeply personal. In Mpumalanga for instance, an activist asked, “Why do consultants keep happening to us and not with us?” Across provinces, participants voiced concerns about how informal workers, such as waste pickers and recyclers, are often excluded from municipal green procurement processes. These were not abstract issues; they reflected the very real disconnect between policy intentions and people’s lived experiences.
Phase 3 – post-dialogue action:
The dialogues did not end when the sessions closed. Following the workshops, the team undertook a detailed post-dialogue analysis to surface recurring themes, highlight province-specific insights and distil emerging areas of opportunity and concern. This analysis is informing practical discussions about how to better support municipalities in implementing a locally-grounded Just Transition.
The analysis of the insights and reflections from the dialogues and stakeholder interviews were synthesised to inform a national Just Transition position paper ahead of COP30. This position paper serves to elevate local voices onto a national and global platform, embedding municipal priorities and lived realities into South Africa’s broader climate narrative.
Together, the post-dialogue analysis and position paper represent an important shift: from consultation to co-creation, from disparate conversations to a consolidated vision for municipal-led climate action.
What we learned
This project demonstrates the appetite participants have for change. In some provinces, stakeholder engagement fatigue is high. Community members are overwhelmed by engagement with research and consultations devoid of actual change.
Additionally, while national actors frame the Just Transition through policy and finance, local communities frame it through lived experiences, food insecurity, flooding, broken services, exclusion. Stories of storm water flooding, rising food prices, broken infrastructure and youth unemployment are shared across contexts and equally pressing.
In designing these dialogues, a roadmap for how change emerges from conversations becomes clear. Dialogues surface the lived realities of participants, and when those realities are then channelled into national policy instruments, they can provide a clear next step for taking action.
This action is practical, relationship-based support: mentorships, secondments, site visits and real time advice; the kind of support characteristic of a Learning Network.
A key enabler of this action is for local leaders to have national and provincial partners who champion the outcomes of these dialogues at their levels. A key lesson emerging from this work is that reaching and equipping champions at different scales will be critical for enabling implementation.
Summarised, we can learn four lessons from the LJT Dialogues project:
- Fatigue is real and without action, engagement becomes erosion.
- Justice that is only technical is injustice. Stakeholders at a local level frame the LJT through lived experiences, food insecurity, flooding, broken services exclusion.
- Real shifts happen when officials, community leaders and traditional authorities talk with one another, not past each other.
- Relationships are infrastructure. People repeatedly asked for relationship based support: site visits, peer mentorship, not just more documents or training manuals.
What’s next for local climate leadership
The local realities and municipal recommendations for COP30 and beyond will be written up into a National Just Transition position paper. This paper will act as the north star for South Africa’s implementation of a localised JT across contexts.
The dialogues unlocked new momentum and revealed a strong appetite for continued action. As climate impacts intensify, municipalities need practical and sustained support. To deepen and sustain this work, three pathways are being explored:
- A champions Learning Network or Community of Practice to enable peer mentorship and connections with technical and financial partners
- An accelerator or pilot support programme to help municipalities package and finance climate-smart projects aligned with JT principles
- Strategic influence, ensuring that local voices meaningfully inform national and international climate governance
These next steps reflect a growing recognition that climate leadership is already emerging at the local level: in council chambers, ward committees, traditional forums and informal networks. This local leadership now needs to be supported, consolidated, resourced and scaled.
This work was made possible by the support and collaboration of the South African Local Government Association (SALGA), Heinrich Böll Stiftung South Africa, New Economy Hub, and the African Climate Foundation.
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