Contesting the Just Transition from the Waterberg Coalfield
Grounded socio-ecological possibilities for (co)habitable futures
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 17826344 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Thembi Luckett (0000-0002-2361-7893, Durham University, corresponding author), Matthew Michael Wingfield (0000-0002-3974-4694, Stellenbosch University) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-15 |
| Publication date | 2026-04-16 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Anthropology Southern Africa (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2332-3264 • E-ISSN: 2332-3256 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/23323256.2025.2583532 |
| OpenAlex | W7154701726 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 38 |
Anthropogenic climate change through fossil-fuel reliance has necessitated decarbonisation on a global scale. The “Just Transition,” as a concept embedded in a particular and shifting discursive context, weighs up environmental ambitions against material livelihood impacts, and is increasingly gaining significant political currency. It is, however, often implemented in a top-down techno-managerial manner that flattens out localised socio-ecological and contextually specific dynamics. By thinking from the Waterberg Coalfield in Limpopo, South Africa, we explore the tensions between local livelihoods dependent on fossil-fuel capital and those that are historically foreclosed and are at increased future risk due to the South African government’s continued commitment to coal economies. By embedding debates about future “justice” in the history of injustice, racialised dispossession and enclosure, we explore how the political ecologies of land, water and energy are folded into a politics of a just transition from below. A granular and relational analysis of these divergent livelihoods and their socio-ecological bases offers the possibility for transformative pathways of “just” futures for the Waterberg and beyond.
Futures contract · Grounded theory · Politics · Transition (genetics) · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Mining and Resource Management
Twentieth-Century South Africa
War Against Ourselves
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
From buying out to buying in? Exploring the politics of value creation in green energy transition projects
Just transition
Sacrifice Along the Energy Continuum
Just Transitions’ Meanings
The tin mines of the Waterberg (Transvaal), 1905-1914
Renewing the future
Do renewable energy communities deliver energy justice? Exploring insights from 71 European cases
Can we equitably manage the end of the fossil fuel era
Climate, violence, resource extraction and ecological debt
Redistributive politics and the temporalities of crisis
Defining just transition
Resource geographies II
South Africa’s unjust climate reparations
Suspended redistribution
New energy spaces
The Political Economy of Energy Transitions
Electing to electrify
Resource geographies 1
The political economy of the 'just transition
Resource Triumphalism
Fossilized conservation, or the unsustainability of saving nature in South Africa
The Land and its People
Scarcity as a means of governing
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |