What's the problem represented to be? : A poststructural policy analysis of South Africa's Just Energy Transition Partnership

This study critically interrogates South Africa’s Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP). Rooted in poststructuralism, it adopts the ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ (WPR) approach to policy analysis. The research aims to interrogate how the JETP constructs the ‘problem’ it addresses by asking, what its implicit problem representations are, and what underlying presuppositions, assumptions, omittances, and effects they have. It applies a theoretical framework grounded in WPR together with the concepts of financial subordination, the wall street consensus and renewable energy financialisation. By using a qualitative design, the analysis focuses on South Africa’s JETP texts: the Just Transition Framework, the Just Energy Transition Investment Plan, and the Just Energy Transition Implementation Plan. The study identifies two key problem representations: mobilising finance for an ‘uninvestable South Africa’ and ensuring a just transition by diversifying the coal-dependent economy. These are underpinned by a wall street consensus discourse and the political rationalities of Public-Private-Partnerships and financialisation. The study concludes that the JETP risks perpetuating financial subordination and that it frames justice primarily as market participation. The JETP also produces effects, both discursive effects but also how it produces particular types of ‘subjects’, ‘objects’ and ‘places’.