Constructing Hybrid Futures: Fossil-Green Interpath Governance in a Global South Resource Periphery

Amid accelerating environmental crises, economic geography has increasingly turned to green path development. Yet existing research underplays how actors strategically shape the coevolution of fossil and green paths, particularly in Global South resource peripheries where industrial trajectories emerge simultaneously. This article advances the interpath linkages framework by examining how actors govern interpath relations during the critical phase of resource mobilization. It makes three distinct conceptual contributions. First, it embeds interpath dynamics within a Global South perspective, conceptualizing how triple structural pressures (foreign leverage, developmental stress, and efficiency imperatives) reshape resource formation beyond Western-centric transition models. Second, to understand how industrial futures are negotiated, it introduces the framework of interpath governance, capturing how path advocates, systemic actors, and hybrid firm actors deploy antagonistic and moderating modes of agency across spatial scales to assemble, neutralize, or contest interpath linkages. Third, it unveils concrete strategies through which interpath dynamics unfold in investment, market, knowledge, and legitimacy arenas. Developed through qualitative research in Namibia, where major offshore oil discoveries coincide with ambitious green hydrogen initiatives, the findings demonstrate how interpath governance operates under acute context pressures to harmonize seemingly opposing industrial futures. Overall, the article advances an agency-centered understanding of fossil-green co-evolution, highlights how interpath governance shapes hybrid energy trajectories, and thus contributes to debates on green path creation and the structural constraints on sustainability transitions in a Global South resource periphery.