SCS5: Bridging or Widening the Gap? Just Energy Transitions in the Global North and South

The Just Energy Transition (JET) has become a central pillar of global climate policy, yet its interpretation and implementation differ markedly between the Global North and South. While advanced economies increasingly emphasize carbon pricing, regulatory harmonization, and technological innovation, developing regions must simultaneously confront energy poverty, food insecurity, employment pressures, and long-standing structural inequalities. This session examines whether current JET policy frameworks promote convergence or instead reproduce existing global asymmetries.
The panel brings together five complementary papers offering empirical and conceptual perspectives across trade, social policy, governance, and development finance. The first paper analyzes Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM) and their implications for the Global South, highlighting trade exposure, distributional impacts, and structural adjustment challenges arising from Northern climate policies. The second explores energy poverty and the social architecture of just transition strategies, interrogating how justice priorities differ across income contexts. The third investigates patterns of convergence and divergence in JET policy design, assessing whether harmonization is emerging and under what institutional conditions. The fourth critically evaluates development finance and clean energy transitions in Sub-Saharan Africa, questioning whether prevailing green growth models foster empowerment or deepen dependency. The fifth paper links inadequate access to modern energy with food insecurity in Ghana, providing micro-level evidence of how energy poverty shapes lived development outcomes.
Together, these contributions move beyond rhetoric to analyze how justice is operationalized in practice. The session offers comparative insights into Global North–South dynamics, contributing to broader debates on climate governance, development pathways, and distributional consequences in an increasingly interconnected energy transition.

Although global access to energy has increased, Africa faces a dual challenge of urbanisation and energy poverty. In Africa south of the Sahara (SSA), many households lack access to electricity and clean cooking, yet the urban population is rising. Our study sheds light on how the economic growth-energy nexus mediates the relationship between urbanisation and energy poverty in SSA.
Using a mediation analysis framework, we evaluate the direct effect of urbanisation on energy poverty and the indirect pathways that operate through the vital economic channel. The data cover 44 SSA countries from 2000 to 2023. We employ Driscoll-Kraay standard errors and linear dynamic panel-data estimation using Arellano-Bover and Blundell-Bond methods as robustness checks. We find that urbanisation significantly increases GDP per unit of energy use (β=1.36,p<0.01), and GDP per unit of energy use significantly increases electricity access (β=1.12,p<0.01), producing a positive indirect effect (β=1.53). However, the direct effect of urbanisation on access to electricity is negative and significant (β=-3.33,p<0.01). Regarding access to clean energy cooking technologies, the mediation results indicate that the indirect effect of urbanisation on clean energy access is positive (0.008), driven by its positive effects on the economic-energy nexus, which accounts for just 1% of the total effect. These findings show that the negative effects of urbanisation on energy poverty are offset by economic growth. 
Urbanisation's positive effects materialise merely when it generates sustained economic growth and when infrastructure systems expand more than or in proportion to demographic shifts. A coordinated policy on industry, urbanization, and energy is consequently indispensable to convert urbanisation into inclusive and sustainable electrification outcomes.

This paper compares national just energy transition policy pathways to assess whether countries are converging toward common design principles or following persistently divergent approaches shaped by institutional, economic, and social conditions. Drawing on research conducted within the SARChI Chair in Just Energy Transition and the SAGE BRIDGE collaboration, we develop a comparative analytical framework that examines governance structures, labour-market dynamics, inequality profiles, and energy-system characteristics across countries.
We investigate whether emerging transition strategies reflect shared norms-such as stakeholder participation, social protection mechanisms, skills development, and green industrial policy-or whether structural constraints continue to produce differentiated pathways. Particular attention is given to how institutional capacity, fiscal space, historical energy dependence, and existing inequality influence policy ambition, sequencing, and distributional design.
By identifying patterns of convergence and areas of structural divergence, the paper contributes to the broader debate on global coordination in climate policy. It interrogates whether the just transition is evolving into a coherent global policy paradigm or remains context-specific and fragmented. The findings have implications for international cooperation, financing frameworks, and the design of justice-oriented transition strategies that are both globally informed and locally grounded.

This paper examines energy poverty through the lens of just transition policy, with particular attention to how justice priorities vary across income contexts. We explore how the distributive, procedural, and recognition dimensions of justice manifest differently in low-, middle-, and higher-income settings, and argue that policy design must be sensitive to these structural differences. In low-income contexts, distributive concerns-such as affordability and access-tend to dominate. In middle-income settings, tensions often arise between affordability, employment, and industrial transition. In higher-income contexts, procedural participation and recognition of vulnerable groups become more prominent. By comparatively analysing these dynamics, the paper unpacks the "social architecture" of the just transition, highlighting how institutional capacity, labour market structures, and existing inequalities shape outcomes. The core contribution is to move beyond uniform policy prescriptions and instead advocate for context-responsive energy strategies aligned with lived vulnerabilities and socioeconomic realities.

This paper examines how South Africa can respond economically to the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), and specifically whether domestic carbon tax reform can mitigate its trade and welfare impacts. Using a computable general equilibrium (CGE) framework (GTAP-E), we model CBAM as an external carbon-based trade shock affecting South Africa's carbon-intensive export sectors, particularly iron and steel and aluminium. We quantify its economy-wide effects on GDP, welfare, sectoral exports, emissions, and the distribution of carbon revenues.
The central question is whether strengthening South Africa's domestic carbon tax-especially under Phase 2 reforms-can act as a strategic response to CBAM. By internalising carbon costs domestically, South Africa may retain carbon revenues that would otherwise be paid at the EU border, while simultaneously reducing emissions.
The paper contributes to the literature by jointly modelling CBAM and domestic carbon pricing within a single general equilibrium framework. While existing studies analyse carbon taxes and CBAM separately, we examine their interaction and associated trade-offs between competitiveness and mitigation. Our results aim to inform policy debates on carbon pricing design, trade exposure, and the broader just energy transition in carbon-intensive developing economies.