Navigating by the Southern Cross: Grounding the Just Transition in Local Realities

In the night skies of the southern hemisphere, the Southern Cross has long guided travellers home. Unlike the North Star, fixed and singular, the Southern Cross is a constellation. Four bright points must be read together. Its direction is not assumed; it is interpreted. It asks the navigator to understand context, relationship, and position.

For South Africa’s Just Transition, this feels apt.

Stakeholders in Gauteng explore realities of implementing the Local Just Transition in South Africa. With project partners from the South African Local Government Association, the project travelled across the country to surface what municipalities need to make the Local Just Transition a reality.

Our direction cannot be found by following a single star. It must be read through the constellation of our realities; social, economic, infrastructural and deeply human. And at the centre of that navigation stand municipalities.

Local government is not the final mile of implementation in the Just Transition. It is the site where justice becomes tangible, where climate ambition meets stormwater systems, electricity tariffs, informal settlements, spatial inequality, and local livelihoods. In South Africa, climate change is experienced locally. So too must the Just Transition be realised locally.

Across nine provincial dialogues convened through the Local Just Transition initiative (LJT), a consistent message emerged: the Just Transition will not succeed as a technocratic reform layered onto existing municipal strain. It will hold only if municipalities are recognised, supported and positioned as central actors in shaping the country’s trajectory.

The Southern Cross offers a way to understand what that requires:

The Constellation: Four Orientations for a Local Just Transition

Over the course of this initiative, several themes have surfaced repeatedly. Taken together, we see them forming a constellation, orientations that illuminate what municipalities need to navigate a just and resilient transition.

Star 1: Relational Infrastructure

Municipal governance is not sustained by pipes and cables alone. It is sustained by trust, cooperation, and alignment across spheres of government, communities, business and civil society.

The dialogues made clear that municipalities are fatigued not only by resource constraints, but by fragmented support. Plans proliferate. Reporting multiplies. But alignment is thin. Without coordination, even well-intentioned programmes create duplication and administrative burden.

Relational infrastructure;  peer learning, contextualised support, co-created models, and sustained intergovernmental dialogue, is therefore not a soft add-on. It is a structural prerequisite for delivery under transition conditions.

Star 2: Lived Justice

National discourse often frames the Just Transition through megawatts and emissions. Yet for most municipalities, the transition is not primarily about managing industrial decline/disruption.

Of South Africa’s 257 municipalities, only a small fraction is deeply embedded in coal-dependent economies. The majority are navigating infrastructure backlogs, fiscal strain, extreme weather events, and the daily realities of poverty and exclusion.

For them, justice begins with service delivery that is fair, resilient, and future-oriented. It is about who has access to safe water during drought, whose homes are protected from flooding, whose livelihoods survive economic shifts, and whose voices shape planning processes.

In this sense, the Just Transition is not a new mandate for local government. It is a deepening of its constitutional developmental mandate.

Star 3: Local Resilience

Climate change intensifies demands on infrastructure, budgets and institutional capacity. Municipalities are required to adapt water systems, modernise electricity grids, rethink spatial planning, and manage shifting local economies often with constrained revenue and limited technical support.

Resilience in this context is not only physical. It is institutional and social. It requires learning cultures, adaptive management, and political environments that allow experimentation without punitive backlash. It requires protecting the redistributive role of municipalities even as energy and revenue models shift.

A Just Transition that overlooks municipal financial sustainability risks weakening the very institutions tasked with delivering it.

Star 4: Collective Navigation

If there was one cross-cutting theme from the dialogues, it was the need for coherence.

Municipal officials repeatedly asked for clarity of direction in a crowded policy space. They called for rationalised guidance, simplified reporting expectations, and support offerings that are tailored rather than generic.

Collective navigation does not imply uniformity. Municipal contexts differ widely. But without some alignment of purpose and policy architecture, municipalities are left interpreting transition requirements in isolation.

Learning, coordination and shared intent become the compass.

At the Centre: Municipal Standing

A constellation only becomes meaningful when we understand what holds it together.

At the centre of this Southern Cross is municipal standing.

Not as an administrative afterthought. Not as a delivery agent at the end of a national policy chain. But as the constitutional site where justice is enacted.

The developmental mandate of local government to provide democratic and accountable governance, ensure sustainable service delivery, promote socio-economic development, and encourage community participation, already mirrors the principles of distributive, restorative and procedural justice.

The Just Transition does not introduce a new obligation for municipalities. It intensifies and reframes existing ones in the context of climate change, decarbonisation and energy system reform.

To centre municipalities in the Just Transition is therefore not a political courtesy. It is a structural necessity.

Positioning Local Government in South Africa’s Just Transition

It is from this foundation that the SALGA Just Transition Position Paper emerges.

Drawing on provincial dialogue processes and grounded in the lived realities of municipal governance, the Position Paper articulates a clear argument: that Just Transition policies and programmes must centre municipalities and recognise that the transition extends far beyond industrial restructuring.

It reframes the transition as an infrastructure, finance and governance challenge as much as an energy and industrial one. It calls for coordinated direction, rationalised policy guidance, prioritised support for municipal capability, and an enabling institutional culture that supports adaptation and learning.

Crucially, it asserts that a just transition cannot be achieved if municipal financial sustainability, workforce resilience and core service delivery functions are weakened in the process.

The Position Paper therefore does not present municipalities merely as implementers of national ambition. It positions them as co-authors of South Africa’s transition pathway.

A Compass for the Work Ahead

The Southern Cross does not point to a single destination. Its meaning emerges through alignment, through the relationships between its stars.

Likewise, South Africa’s Just Transition will not be secured by a singular directive. It will depend on whether relational infrastructure, lived justice, resilience and collective navigation are anchored in strong municipal institutions.

National commitments and global negotiations matter. But the success of the transition will ultimately be measured in municipal council chambers, infrastructure maintenance schedules, tariff reforms, spatial development frameworks, and community forums.

If municipalities are supported, coordinated and recognised as central actors, the Just Transition becomes navigable.

If they are marginalised or overburdened, the country’s ambition will falter at the point of delivery.

Under the Southern Cross, the question is not whether we have a vision. It is whether we are aligned around the institutional centre that must carry it.

Municipal standing is not peripheral to South Africa’s Just Transition. It is the axis on which it turns.

Edited: Michelle du Toit & Natalie Tannous

This blog post is subject to the following disclaimer.