Influencing a Just Transition in the Mining Sector in Sub-Saharan Africa

Key points: • There will be a transition within the global energy system. • Broadly this transition will involve a lessening of coal mining and an increase in the mining of transition minerals. • This process has the potential to do significant harm to coal miners if it is not managed properly. • While it also offers opportunities to miners in transition minerals these opportunities come with hurdles: o A rapid increase in production can encourage reducing labour standards (e.g., DRC and Zimbabwe) o Heavily mechanised new mines often rely on fewer, un-unionised workers (e.g., Zambia) o Just Transition advocates often promise that their proposed transitions will create more jobs than they cost, however the promised jobs are often nonpermanent (construction of solar panels); of a lower quality (retrenched miners reframed as agricultural workers) or may only appear a long-time after the end of the coal industry (e.g. a transition to platinum in South Africa). • The ‘Just Transition’ serves as a ‘boundary term’ that links different concepts of justice while obfuscating differing best interests. • Common concerns for unions within existing utilisations of the term ‘Just Transition’ include advocacy for increased privation and the way that the terminology ignores intra-and-international inequalities.