What Does It Really Take to action ‘Partnering for Impact’ in a Just Transition?
Author/s: Alexandrea Roberts
Partnering is a word we often hear in development spaces, especially when we talk about complex, multi-stakeholder transitions like the Just Transition. But too often, partnering remains a surface commitment. A logo on a slide. A reference in a policy. A word that feels good but risks meaning little. In the Local Just Transition (LJT) project, the EDP team were deliberate about doing things differently. Over the past seven months across the nine South African provinces, we worked with the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) to convene a series of dialogues. These weren’t simply public engagements or information sessions. They were spaces for reckoning. Places where municipal leaders, traditional authorities, youth organisers and community members could sit together and name what transition really means when experienced on the ground. Take a glimpse into these catalytic conversations and the path forward they have forged.
Participants at the Mpumalanga dialogues shifted from asking what the Just Transition meant for their jobs to exploring the unqiue ways the province could lead a Just Transition at a local level in the country.
Getting onto the same page
The Local Just Transition dialogues project set out to build shared understanding of the Just Transition, surface local opportunities and constraints in implementation and spark the long-term partnering essential to successful implementation.
For some stakeholders, the concept of a Just Transition was still abstract. In several provinces, the Just Transition was conflated with energy policy alone: renewables, coal, loadshedding. This confusion was the perfect point of entry for the dialogues. Trusting that understanding can unfold mattered more than where that understanding started. In many places that is exactly what happened: local government officials who began with uncertainty moved toward asking how to integrate the Just Transition into their Integrated Development Plans and Local Economic Development strategies. That shift didn’t happen through lectures: it happened through listening, reflecting and linking the transition to lived realities.
The realities that surfaced through these dialogues were clear and urgent. Municipal officials shared stories of small towns where boreholes had long run dry; of informal workers like waste pickers being consistently excluded from tendering processes; and of the exhaustion that comes from trying to deliver on climate mandates without the resources, support or mandate clarity to do so. These stories reflected the structural challenges municipalities face daily and underscored a crucial insight: without meaningful, context-responsive collaboration, the Just Transition risks reinforcing the very inequities it aims to dismantle.
So, what does partnering look like, here?
Using these dialogues for partnering wasn’t a checklist or a stakeholder map. They weren’t a process of convening people to validate predetermined plans. These dialogues meant allowing municipalities to define their own entry points into the implementation of a Just Transition in their province. They meant adapting methods to fit different capacities and contexts. And perhaps most importantly, these dialogues meant staying in the discomfort when communities pushed back, challenged assumptions and when the road ahead was unclear.
In that space, something changed.
Directly after the dialogues in Limpopo for instance, participants surfaced the potential of linking solar investments to agro-processing and local agricultural value chains. In the Western Cape, there were hard conversations about displacement, inequality and spatial justice. In Mpumalanga, there was palpable tension and honesty about the region’s historical ties to coal and the need to chart a path forward that doesn’t erase local identity in the name of decarbonisation. These were not deliverables; they were expressions of place-based possibility.
The longer-term outcomes from these dialogues also centralise partnering. Firstly, the reflections from the dialogues will frame a national Just Transition position paper that aims to guide the implementation of a local Just Transition in South Africa. Secondly, networks are being co-created, both within and beyond the local Just Transition Dialogues project, to support peer exchange and collaboration among municipalities. One such initiative is an interprovincial peer learning network being developed through SALGA’s Provincial Advisors. This network will bring together municipalities and relevant sector departments to deepen awareness of climate change and the Just Transition, share practices and co-develop locally responsive approaches to implementation. The emergence of these networks reflect a growing commitment to build the institutional scaffolding needed to make these spaces of future knowledge-sharing, mentorship and joint problem-solving. Rather than replicating existing platforms, these networks would aim to respond directly to the momentum and relationships built through these provincial dialogues, shaped by the needs and insights of those who participated.
In parallel, locally-grounded pilot initiatives are emerging through ideas voiced during the dialogues that are now being shaped into proposals to attract support and scale. While still in development, several of these proposals aim to address issues such as local economic resilience, inclusive service delivery, and energy access. Stakeholders are encouraged to keep a close eye on work being coordinated through SALGA, municipalities, and sector departments as these locally inspired ideas evolve into tangible interventions.
This shift matters.
Because one of the strongest messages from the dialogues was this. Equity is not a line item in a log frame. Equity is not something you achieve by reaching a certain percentage of stakeholder attendance. Equity is a way of working, a long-term commitment to who gets to lead, how decisions are made and whose knowledge is seen as credible. When partnering is understood in this way – as a living, negotiated and relational practice – justice becomes possible.
Sustaining this shift will take more than goodwill
We need to take seriously the next phase of support, whether that is piloting new models for learning exchange, adapting funding tools to accommodate local complexity or embedding Just Transition principles into formal planning cycles without losing the flexible, bottom-up spirit that made the dialogues effective. The provincial dialogues opened a door. But the work of walking through it – of turning this partnering into long-term infrastructure for equity-led transition – is just beginning.
Partnering for impact is not fast. It’s not always tidy. It can’t be reduced to compliance.
But it’s also where the real work happens, and where real impact is possible. If we’re serious about not leaving anyone behind, then we must ask not only who was consulted but who was invited to lead. And whether we are prepared to build the scaffolding for them to do so. Our willingness to do that, more than any technical solution or policy roadmap, is what will determine whether the Just Transition lives up to its name.
Acknowledgement:
The contributions of Lauren Arendse in shaping this work are gratefully acknowledged.
Editing: Natalie Tannous
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