“We can’t have people begging in the street, when we have oil.” Moral entanglements and gestural politics of Africa’s green energy transition

This article examines the coexistence of expanding fossil-fuel extraction and ambitious energy transition initiatives in Africa through a case study of Ghana. Against narratives that cast decarbonisation and extraction as mutually exclusive trajectories, it explores how climate commitments and hydrocarbon development are increasingly pursued simultaneously. The article addresses a central puzzle: why would a country that has only recently become an oil producer embrace energy transition agendas that appear to challenge a resource widely regarded as a pathway to development? Drawing on interviews, archival ethnography, policy analysis, and stakeholder workshops conducted between 2023 and 2025, I argue that energy transition is not simply a technical process of decarbonisation but a moral and political project through which the contemporary petro-state is being reconstituted. Developing the concepts of performative governance and the integrative state, the article shows how transition frameworks, stakeholder consultations, and climate commitments function as practices of legitimacy-making through which state actors reconcile competing claims concerning development, energy justice, national sovereignty, and climate responsibility. Rather than displacing extraction, energy transition frequently generates new forms of legitimacy for its continuation, embedding fossil fuels within broader narratives of national progress and future-making. By foregrounding the moral foundations of state authority, the article contributes to debates on energy transition, climate governance, political ecology, and the transformation of petro-statehood in the Global South.