Navigating Sub-Saharan African Just and Low-Carbon Transitions: Integrated Governance Approaches in Kenya and South Africa

Abstract Aligning the implementation of climate efforts under the Paris Agreement with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is essential to ensuring socially just green transitions. Yet, in sub-Saharan Africa, national approaches to green transitions vary widely, particularly in how they integrate poverty reduction into climate action. Prevailing theories of policy integration frame such variation as a function of effective institutional and policy design. I advance an alternative explanation: that integration outcomes are shaped by contestations in rule- and norm-setting processes within a fragmented global environmental governance structure. I probe the plausibility of this argument by studying the co-constitutive interplay of structure and agency in two illustrative cases’ just transitions: South Africa and Kenya. I find that dominant actor coalitions strategically leverage the global environmental governance structure to reinforce liberal environmentalism as the core norm of the climate regime. The resulting, incremental changes to the core norm ultimately constrain the integration of poverty reduction into climate action in just transitions.