Just transitions and contested visions: A discourse analysis of South African news media

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 2,500 newspaper articles sourced from the LexisNexis database between 2008 and 2023. We combine two natural language processing tools–structural topic modelling and sentiment analysis–and qualitatively contextualize our findings in a mixed methods approach. We classify just transitions discourses into eight unique narrative clusters: energy security, governance, green economy, fossil fuel phaseout, phaseout alternatives, international investment, labor markets, and procedural justice. Sentiment analysis further reveals wide polarization between clusters. This text-as-data application allows us to uncover contested visions between actors and potential barriers to South Africa’s just energy transition.