Thomas McNamara

In 2021 South Africa signed the first international Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP), an 8.5 billion USD grant-and-loan package to transition from coal-fired electrification to renewable energy. Concurrent with decarbonization are programs to retrain miners and redirect coal-dependent enterprises within the Mpumalanga region, where coal-related work employs over 200,000 people. Crucial to the JETP in Mpumalanga are workshops and trainings co-facilitated by government, trade unions and civil society. However, these actors contest the meanings of climate justice; and offer differing narratives of the material impacts of both climate change and decarbonization. This research will explore how the moral implications of climate change, and of climate change mitigation programs, are created and contested within Mpumalanga’s coal mining townships and mining union offices; and in turn how these intra-communal moral and political projects feed into the rollout of the JETP. In doing so, the project will use climate justice and injustice to enhance the anthropology of ethics, by considering the role of ambivalence in personal and communal moral projects. It also builds upon the anthropology of South Africa by investigating how the nation’s intersecting electricity and climate crises shape, and are influenced by, miners’ changing relationships with unions, government and civil society.