SCC 26

The workshop will examine how Africa's supposed "green transition" is becoming a new chapter in an old story of exploitation. As the world rushes toward renewable energy and climate solutions, African communities find themselves trapped between the devastation of fossil fuels and the false promises of green capitalism. This workshop will expose how the transition away from fossil fuels; marketed as humanity's salvation, is repeating and intensifying the very injustices it claims to solve.
The concept of "Just Transition" emerged from the understanding that moving away from fossil fuels must prioritize workers, communities, and human rights. Yet across Africa, we witness a grotesque distortion of these principles. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, children mine cobalt with their bare hands so the Global North can drive electric vehicles with a clean conscience. In Tanzania and Kenya, indigenous communities are violently displaced from their ancestral lands; not for oil wells this time, but for carbon credit schemes that transform their forests into financial instruments for European and US corporations. In Uganda, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline demonstrates how fossil fuel extraction continues unabated, bringing forced evictions and state violence, even as the world speaks of energy transition.
This workshop will bring together frontline stories from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and the DRC to share experiences of this new scramble for Africa. We will hear how multinational corporations deploy the language of climate action while perpetuating colonial patterns of extraction. The workshop will reveal how the "green transition" operates as a virus of extraction, spreading through three interconnected mechanisms that will be shared during the workshop.
The workshop will critically examine what a genuine Just Transition would require. It cannot mean simply replacing oil wells with lithium mines, or coal plants with carbon offset plantations. True justice demands that Africa's resources benefit African people first, that communities have the right to say no to any form of extraction, and that the Global North pays its climate debt without creating new forms of dependence. We will discuss concrete strategies: from contractual transparency and community ownership models to international solidarity that goes beyond charity to challenge the structures of exploitation.
Participants will engage with uncomfortable truths about the global climate movement itself. How do solar panels built with Congolese cobalt mined by children represent climate justice? What does it mean when indigenous peoples are evicted from their forests in the name of carbon sequestration? Why do we accept a transition that merely shifts environmental devastation from one community to another?