Converging visions, contested narratives: Media discourse analyses of South Africa’s Just Transition
Abstract: Enabling a just transition to a low-carbon economy is crucial for garnering public support in fossil fuel-dependent countries like South Africa, where coal comprises the majority of the energy mix. Rapid phaseout from coal raises concerns of job losses, energy affordability, and supply constraints, which could exacerbate already frequent blackouts from load shedding. These challenges have politicized South Africa’s energy transition and led to diverse and clashing discourses surrounding the just transition. In this study, we unravel just transition discourses represented in the news media from approximately 2,300 newspaper articles sourced from the LexisNexis database between 2008 and 2023. We combine two natural language processing tools–structural topic modeling and sentiment analysis–and qualitatively contextualize our findings in a mixed methods approach. We classify just transitions discourses into three actor clusters: just transition skeptics, just transition realists, and just transition opportunists. Sentiment analysis further reveals strong polarization between topics. For example, articles focused on technologies and financing describe the just transition in positive terms. Meanwhile, articles that focus on party politics and extractivism describe the just transition in more negative terms. This text-as-data application allows us to uncover contested visions between actors and potential barriers to South Africa’s just energy transition.
*Joint with UMass Economics Department
