# Renewable energy development in Africa: neoliberal green colonialism and emerging forms of appropriation

Yanis Rihi

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Yanis Rihi. Renewable energy development in Africa: neoliberal green colonialism and emerging forms of appropriation. 2026. hal-05512963

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# Renewable energy development in Africa: neoliberal green colonialism and emerging forms of appropriation<fnref n="1" />

Yanis Rihi, yanis.rihi@universite-paris-saclay.fr<fnref n="2" />

Paris Saclay University, France

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-9507-7602

## Abstract

This article examines new dynamics in international development amid massive renewable energy deployment in Africa. Drawing on several projects, it examines emerging conflictual spaces shaped by export-oriented infrastructure, asymmetrical financing agreements, territorial reconfigurations and national strategies prioritising transnational capital accumulation over domestic energy access and social justice. These new trends, which have received insufficient attention, constitute forms of neoliberal green colonialism, taking shape simultaneously through global decarbonisation agendas and their internalisation by domestic elites. The analysis shows that current trajectories are likely to prolong extractive governance and rentier structures among already dominant actors, without inherently addressing socio-environmental and energy injustices.

**Keywords:** Energy transitions, Neoliberal green colonialism, Justice, Governance, SDG7

## Introduction

The accelerated deployment of renewable energy projects in Africa is increasingly presented as a beneficial driver of sustainable development and the global energy transition (Dagnachew et al. 2023; IEA 2024; CAN 2025), without necessarily questioning the policies and practices through which this transformation is unfolding. A careful and critical analysis of current dynamics on the continent, however, reveals a more contrasting and conflictual reality. Indeed, behind the apparent universality of discourses framing the energy transition as a shared global aspiration and a collective effort, these projects are increasingly shaped by logics of social exclusion, dispossession of minority communities, and political and financial subordination (Hamouchene 2023; Lang et al. 2024; Akrofi et al. 2024).

Within a context of capitalist globalisation and an increasingly multipolar, fragmented global political economy, some of those pitfalls can be attributed to how international cooperation programmes and domestic policies are designed, evaluated, financed, and governed. The processes through which renewable energy infrastructures are developed, from large-scale solar and wind power generation facilities to export-oriented distribution networks,

<footnote n="1">¹ This is a pre-peer review and editing article submitted to *Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d'études du développement*.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Yanis Rihi is a Political Economy of Development and Environment PhD student at *Paris Saclay University*. His research focuses on how asymmetrical North–South relations, through the prisms of international financial, institutional, political, and epistemic architecture, shape just transitions to decarbonised economies, with a particular emphasis on the Global South.</footnote>
and their socio-environmental effects, therefore, warrant closer scrutiny. Africa, though, currently stands as a geographical blind spot within a fragmented and still relatively embryonic literature corpus, where many grey areas remain and are insufficiently recognised and taken into account, particularly concerning the multiple forms of externalities associated with the widespread adoption of these renewable technologies (see Rihi 2026).

As a response, and to comprehensively make sense of the complex geopolitics underlying renewable energy deployment in African countries as well as the economic and political forces shaping them, the text proceeds in two main steps. Drawing on a critical synthesis of recent empirical case studies and policy analyses across North, West and Southern Africa, the first section mobilises a multidimensional energy justice framework to analyse how contemporary renewable energy development generates intersecting distributive, procedural, restorative and recognition injustices at the territorial level. These include limited contributions to the development of the social, economic and political capabilities of affected communities, which subsequently constrain their ability to shape, benefit from or even contest these transformations (I). Building on this mapping, the second section shifts the analysis to the global political economy of the energy transition, conceptualising these injustices as the localised expressions of a broader regime that this article terms ‘neoliberal green colonialism’. More clearly, it explores how dominant decarbonisation narratives, export-oriented projects, international and national elite alliances, technological lock-ins, and shifting development dynamics combine to reproduce historical patterns of subordination and dispossession, both between and within countries (II).

Overall, the analysis raises critical questions regarding the conditions under which African energy transitions could become genuinely just, sovereign and transformative for the continent and its people, whose energy and social challenges remain acute and pressing.

## Renewable energy in Africa: a multidimensional justice perspective

Drawing on energy justice scholarship¹, this section critically analyses the socio-environmental and energy injustices resulting from the development of recent renewable energy projects across the continent. To do so, it distinguishes four complementary and interrelated dimensions. First, distributive justice interrogates the allocation of costs and benefits associated with renewable energy projects. Second, procedural justice examines the extent to which affected actors are included in, or sometimes excluded from, decision-making processes. Third, restorative justice concerns the availability and effectiveness of social justice measures accompanying such energy projects, such as compensation and restoration, in cases of harm or land dispossession.
Finally, recognition justice focuses on the visibility of identities, rights and plural forms of knowledge that are frequently marginalised or erased in dominant energy transition narratives and their implementation on the ground.

## Distributive justice: territorial disconnection and unequal exposure

If distributive justice concerns the distribution of costs and benefits of renewable energy projects (socio-economic, energy, or environmental), in the African context, the resulting inequities take on particularly marked forms. The first manifestation lies in the decoupling between places of energy production and consumption. Often, electricity produced mainly supplies national or regional networks, while communities living near the infrastructure remain excluded (Akrofi et al. 2024). In Mozambique, for instance, Castán Broto et al. (2018) have shown that the Mocuba solar power plant (40.5 Megawatt), located in a rural province where only 10% of residents have access to electricity, supplies all of its production to the national grid, primarily benefiting urban and industrial areas far away. Similarly, a solar power plant near Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso supplies the national grid without improving access for neighbouring neighbourhoods, which remain severely energy-poor (Cantoni et al. 2022).

In addition to this energy exclusion, a second form of distributive injustice lies in unequal exposure to negative externalities, particularly in terms of access to natural resources and land. Since 2016, the Noor I to IV solar power stations in Ouarzazate, Morocco, have utilised substantial amounts of resources, heightening local tensions over water and agricultural land (Hamouchene 2023, 2024). The complex, spanning 3,000 hectares of communal land, relies on the El Mansour Eddahbi dam. Initially intended for irrigation and domestic use, some of the dam's water is now being diverted to cool turbines and clean solar panels. Consequently, water availability for farmers near the project is reduced, weakening smallholders and worsening desertification in the region. It is worth noting that the ecological cost of the transition is borne locally, in the form of lost access to water, land, and, at times, livelihoods. At the same time, the energy benefits are realised at a national level, with the electricity produced being fed into the central grid to strengthen the country's energy mix and supply security.

However, we can also see this logic unfolding on a larger scale across the African continent. Indeed, a third form of distributive injustice arises when renewable energy is produced for export rather than for domestic consumption. The recent growth of the green hydrogen (GH₂) sector in Africa is a prime example of this trend<sup>ii</sup>. Although the industry is still in its infancy (Dagnachew et al. 2025), ongoing projects are already mobilising large areas of
solar and wind power, significant water resources, and dedicated logistics infrastructures for export (Tunn et al. 2024). In Mali and Nigeria, for example, several initiatives aimed at supplying Europe with renewable energy neglect the energy needs of local populations, who continue to rely on polluting fossil fuels. Simultaneously, renewable energy production is exported and integrated into global value chains rather than used to transform energy systems (Löhr et al. 2022). It is essential to keep in mind that while initiatives like M-Kopa Solar<sup>iii</sup> or Solar Sister<sup>iv</sup> demonstrate that expanding energy access in a more inclusive and territorialised way is possible, these remain marginal in practice, partly due to a lack of funding and political support, which are mainly captured by these large, centralised GH<sub>2</sub> projects (Dagnachew et al. 2025).

Yet, on a technical level, the decentralised exploitation of renewable energy, such as mini-grids or individual systems, remains an avenue worth considering for policymakers. For one thing, it can circumvent the substantial costs of extending the electrical grid to rural, remote, or peri-urban regions lacking infrastructure, thereby offering a practical means of alleviating energy precarity while containing costs and deployment times (Avadikyan and Mainguy 2016). Nevertheless, it should be noted that, despite their potential, these approaches also tend to shift the financial and organisational burden onto the population. Indeed, households sometimes have to bear the cost of acquiring, maintaining, and governing devices in contexts where economic and institutional capacities remain limited. Therefore, without public mechanisms for cost-sharing or subsidies, there is a risk that these models will reproduce access inequalities on a larger scale, pitting solvent households against vulnerable ones. The challenge, thus, lies not only in diversifying energy production and access modes but also in establishing a governance framework that can sustainably support these devices. This requires, among other things, new forms of coordination between centralised and decentralised systems, supported by institutional, political, and economic innovations<sup>v</sup>.

***Procedural justice: land rights, exclusion, and technocratic governance***

It is possible to hypothesise that these multiple forms of distributive injustices stem from policy
design and decision-making processes, or the lack thereof. In other words, they result from
procedural injustice, first manifested by the systematic exclusion of groups lacking formal land
rights. This phenomenon is part of the historical context of land ownership in Africa,
characterised by the colonial codification of land and the imposition of written cadastral
systems over existing customary rights. Indeed, it is evident that in many ongoing renewable
energy projects across the continent, negotiations are often limited to parties holding official
land titles, thereby excluding customary users, pastoralists, landless farmers, and women.
However, these groups' rights to use land remain essential to their livelihoods. That is why we
can say that this exclusion, as argued by Akrofi et al. (2024), institutionalises their
invisibilisation all the while increasing their vulnerability and locking land arbitration
processes.

These challenges are particularly acute in large-scale solar and wind parks and in the
development of their accompanying infrastructure, including electrolyser plants, roads, and
workers' housing zones. This setup imposes a form of territorial zoning that, in many cases,
restricts or even denies access to communal lands and pastoral zones. Ultimately, it reveals a
territorial organisation where host countries accommodate infrastructure at the expense of
exacerbating land conflicts directly inherited from the colonial era. Such current conflicts are
usually manifested with dispossession dynamics that weaken livelihoods, ecosystems and the
connections between some communities and their environments (Tunn et al. 2024).

In addition to land exclusion, a second form of procedural injustice exists, that of the
centralisation of decision-making in closed and opaque circles composed, mainly, of state and
international experts. In Mozambique, for instance, the public company FUNAE (Fundo de
Energia) leads most renewable energy projects in direct connection with international donors,
without properly consulting local populations. Consequently, as Castán Broto et al. (2018)
contend, the location of infrastructure, technological choices, financing modalities, and
development strategies are often determined privately. A similar pattern emerges from green
hydrogen projects in Mali and Nigeria, which are mainly designed and driven by multilateral
donors and international agencies, yet implemented on the ground through weak national
coordination and minimal local involvement (Löhr et al. 2022).

These two forms of procedural injustice, the exclusion of groups without formal land
rights and the technocratic centralisation of decisions, therefore, progressively tend to establish
a governance system in which community voices and expectations are marginalised. In
addition, this form of injustice simultaneously limits the possibility of obtaining reparations,
opening a third dimension to our analysis.

***Restorative justice: inadequate compensation and foreclosed socio-economic futures***

Restorative justice, intended to provide fair compensation and restoration mechanisms,
primarily relates to financial compensation in our case, which is often considered insufficient,
unfair, or merely symbolic (Akrofi et al. 2024). For instance, in the Ouarzazate region, local
groups have experienced a significant reduction in access to water due to the Noor solar
projects. Yet, they have not received adequate compensation from either foreign or Moroccan
operators or the government, as demonstrated by Hamouchene (2023). The same applies in
Ghana, where, according to Stock et al. (2023, 2025), only four landowners with formal land
titles were compensated during the development of the Lawra and Kaleo solar plants,
effectively excluding customary users, particularly women and herders who historically relied
on these lands for gathering firewood resources.

A second form of injustice lies in the lack of socio-economic support measures, such as professional retraining, training programmes or assistance in setting up sustainable activities, for displaced populations or those deprived of their livelihoods (Akrofi et al. 2024). Consequently, in some areas of Africa, renewable energy adoption often causes lasting disruption to local economies. The jobs created during the construction phase are temporary and low-skilled, and few strategies and policies are in place to integrate workers or rural youth into the new value chains (Tunn and Müller 2025). For instance, a ten-gigawatt (GW) solar project in Egypt is estimated to create around 45,000 jobs during construction, compared to only 2,500 positions during the operational phase (CAN 2025), with a portion of operational roles likely to be filled by more competent foreign labour from the Global North. Moreover, concerns have been raised about working conditions and the lack of essential services, such as roads, hospitals, and schools, in desert or isolated areas where these infrastructures are constructed, reinforcing the idea of a transition that mobilises territories without truly developing them.

Furthermore, the refusal to transfer technologies and know-how deprives host countries
of the opportunity to develop local skills in design, maintenance or equipment manufacturing
(Newell and Phillips 2016). This results in a technological lock-in, whereby the added value of
these major transformations is captured elsewhere, while expertise remains in the centres of
power and decision-making. This contributes to keeping African economies dependent on the
Global North and limits their ability to reap lasting benefits from the ongoing energy transitions.
The absence of a concomitant social transition to the energy transition subsequently renders
numerous households devoid of employment prospects, thereby contributing to the emergence
of a 'surplus population,' to borrow Stock et al.'s (2023) expression, that is, a growing segment
of displaced or excluded rural residents from the benefits of the renewable energy sector,
rendered superfluous by a transition model that offers them no new socio-economic prospects.
Beyond immediate economic, financial, or material losses, it is, in fact, identities, knowledge, and collective rights that are being silenced or erased in the long run. It is precisely here that the fourth dimension of the energy justice framework, recognition, comes into play. The first injustice here concerns the ignorance of customary land rights, which can lead to expropriation or violent confiscation of land, as occurred in the Saharawi territories, where nine wind farms and five solar projects, representing almost 2.5 GW, were developed to supply the Moroccan national grid and, ultimately, European energy markets. Local communities, who were already experiencing chronic energy shortages, had their land reallocated, their biocultural practices threatened, and their claims suppressed (Sanchez Contrera et al. 2023; Hamouchene 2023).

A second form of recognition injustice concerns the systematic marginalisation of women in African energy transitions. As illustrated by the hydroelectric cooperatives studied by Wiese (2020) in Ethiopia, while decentralised projects have improved access to electricity and household living conditions, the economic and social benefits have been distributed unevenly. Owing to limited access to information, inadequate consultation, and weak participation mechanisms, women have been largely excluded from decision-making processes and the governance of these technologies, despite carrying out the majority of domestic energy-related activities.

More broadly, these inequalities are exacerbated by the absence of gender-sensitive energy policies. Gender bias in the procedural dimension of energy policies remains pervasive, operating through the persistent exclusion of women from consultation, decision-making and governance processes, thereby marginalising women's differentiated needs in terms of energy access, mobility and security. In many rural areas, for instance, the construction of large-scale renewable energy projects poses a risk of shortages or privatisation of natural resources, restricting access to shared resources such as water, wood, and agricultural land (Tunn et al. 2024). These drawbacks, however, have been shown to increase women's workload, forcing them to travel longer distances to meet household needs (Akrofi et al. 2024). Ultimately, this disconnect between energy policies and gender dimensions could lead to a continued reliance on fossil fuels in many domestic settings. In other words, due to a lack of accessible or affordable alternatives, households, primarily women, continue to rely on kerosene or charcoal as Löhr et al. (2022) have warned.

Furthermore, injustice in recognition also extends to the epistemic dimension, where local knowledge, multiple ways of relating to the environment, and social ties to the territory are continually devalued or even disqualified. The removal of spaces through privatisation or state control over vast expanses of land and resources, where these forms of knowledge have
historically been applied, leads to the invisibilisation of local management and sharing practices, such as water management, soil rotation and forest preservation. It is sometimes further reinforced by dominant narratives surrounding the energy transition, such as those describing spaces hosting renewable energy infrastructure as marginal or underutilised, thereby legitimising their appropriation in the name of ecological progress and the fight against climate change (Zografos 2022). Tunn et al. (2024) highlight this well regarding the development of GH₂ in Africa, where international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and various multilateral agencies perpetuate the pervasive narrative of ‘vast and empty lands’, subtly reactivating the historical colonial doctrine of *terra nullius* in the process, under which empty or unexploited lands were considered legitimate grounds for appropriation by others.

Hamouchene (2024) cites the Noor solar project in Morocco as a prime example of this (neo)colonial narrative. Indeed, in an evaluation report, the World Bank (2018, 23), a co-financer of the project, describes the area hosting the infrastructure as ‘a sandy and arid terrain allowing only small shrubs to grow’, deeming it unsuitable for agricultural development due to a lack of water. This presentation portrays the area as empty and unproductive. However, the same document omits the presence of the Sidi Ayad transhumant pastoral tribe, which has been established in the area for generations, by stating, ‘The land acquisition for the project will have no impact on the livelihoods of local communities.’ (69).

Ultimately, as the aforementioned cases have shown, multiform injustices do not operate in isolation from one another. On the contrary, they intersect and reinforce each other in a process in which infrastructures, institutions, and narratives are articulated to reproduce enduring forms of dependency and local dispossession (see **Table 1** below).

<table><caption>**Table 1.** A review of the literature on distributive, procedural, restorative and recognition injustices in Africa's renewable energy projects.</caption><thead><tr><td>Dimensions</td><td>Main forms</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Distributive</td><td>Decoupling between rural production sites and urban/industrial consumption; differentiated exposure to externalities on water, land and forests; prioritisation of export uses at the expense of local demand; fossil fuel lock-in for domestic uses; marginalisation and underfunding of decentralised solutions.</td></tr><tr><td>Procedural</td><td>Systematic exclusion of communities and customary users; land negotiations limited to official landowners; technocratic concentration and centralisation of decision-making (state-funders); reclassification of commons as underutilised land to legitimise transfers of use and appropriation.</td></tr><tr><td>Restorative</td><td>Insufficient, unfair or purely symbolic financial compensation; lack of resettlement, retraining and technical training programmes; refusal to transfer technology and know-how; emergence of a ‘surplus population’ deprived of economic and social prospects.</td></tr></tbody></table>
<table><tr><td>Recognition</td><td>Invisibility of customary and collective land rights; marginalisation of women and rural youth in decision-making processes; erasure of ecological knowledge and local practices; rhetoric of <i>terra nullius</i> that naturalises appropriation and dispossession.</td></tr></table>

Source: Author, based on current literature cited in the bibliography.

For all that, these ‘lived injustices’, as we can call them, experienced daily by populations affected by current trends in the energy transition in Africa, cannot be understood solely at the local level. They are indeed most often rooted in power relations that transcend territories and manifest within the international development community, which shapes, directs, and constrains national energy policies. In other words, they constitute explicit territorialised expressions of deeper global logics. Behind each of these cases, discreet but decisive mechanisms are at work, such as, for instance, the weight of sovereign debt, which constrains budgetary choices; the conditionalities attached to multilateral funding, which favour bankable and large-scale projects; and the injunction of international climate agendas, in which the voice of African countries remains underrepresented or sometimes invisible. These elements inescapably remind us that the injustices associated with the adoption of renewable energy in Africa are part of the ongoing legacy of an international community marked by a complex colonial history and currently redefined by modern systems of finance, energy and knowledge, that needs to be comprehensively understood and identified, as we will show in the next section.

## On neoliberal green colonialism as the horizon of African energy's transition

The fundamental issue, in this vein, is no longer merely to document the socio-environmental and energy injustices associated with renewable energy development in Africa, but also to question the structural conditions that perpetuate such injustices and, in many cases, could render them systemic. To this end, this section advances an analytical shift from the territorial manifestations of injustice identified in the previous section to their global political and economic determinants, asking, in the background, whether just energy transitions are feasible within an international development framework in which the rules remain unevenly defined and applied. To do so, it mobilises the analytical category of green colonialism as a lens for situating contemporary African energy transitions within a longer historical continuum of power, subordination, and capital accumulation between the Global North and South. In that sense, rather than constituting a rupture with past development trajectories, current trends are shown to extend and reconfigure colonial and neoliberal logics through new climate narratives, technological regimes and financial architectures.
*The decarbonisation consensus and the production of green sacrifice zones*

To shed light on such global dynamics, it is helpful to begin with what Bringel and Svampa (2023) refer to as the ‘decarbonisation consensus’, a dominant narrative claiming that the climate crisis can be solved through green growth, centred on electrification, digitalisation, and the large-scale development of renewable energy sources. This narrative, however, rests on the implicit assumption of privileged access to resources located mainly in the Global South, such as land, water, and critical minerals (Valderrama and Cardoso 2025; Oxfam 2025). In many ways, this consensus reaffirms the representation of African territories as repositories of land, resources, and productive capacity intended to fuel the global energy transition, or nominally as ‘green sacrifice zones’ to borrow Zografos’ (2022) formulation.

This logic is essential to keep in mind because it notably influences, for instance, the industrial strategies of the European Green Deal and the growing bilateral partnerships to develop the green hydrogen sector in Africa (Feffer and Lander 2024). An example of this is the German strategy, which uses development cooperation instruments to organise its future energy supply chains. Indeed, between 2023 and 2025, the German Agency for International Cooperation for Development (GIZ) supported green hydrogen initiatives in at least 20 developing countries through energy diplomacy programmes, technical assistance, and training. Meanwhile, its multilateral development bank (KfW) established financial instruments dedicated to hydrogen derivatives (CAN 2025). Although these actions are officially conducted under the Sustainable Development Agenda, they explicitly aim to secure future supplies for the German industry, KfW having explicitly highlighted the ‘significant opportunities to position German companies’ in this strategic market (CAN 2025, 12).

However, the dominant position of foreign operators in this emerging industry raises questions, particularly about how the energy transition can be leveraged for geopolitical and economic gain, thereby reinforcing an international division of energy and value between the Global North and South. In this configuration, renewable energy projects could be interpreted as instruments for sustaining energy-intensive trajectories in the Global North, while entrenching its dominant position in climate governance and relegating African countries to subordinate roles within global value chains, where they would remain primarily suppliers of land, energy, and critical materials (Oxfam 2025). It is within this historical continuum of unequal international development practices that the dynamics observed in Section 1 find conceptual expression in the concept of ‘green colonialism’<sup>vi</sup>.

*Green extractivism and green land grabbing as driving forces of green colonialism*
In our view, two closely linked mechanisms constitute the primary drivers of the green colonialism dynamics unfolding in Africa regarding renewable energy development. Firstly, green extractivism involves the large-scale export of renewable energy to global markets without the redistribution of benefits or the structural transformation of economies it should entail (Tunn et al. 2024; Dietz 2024; Dunlap et al. 2024). Secondly, green land grabbing refers to the appropriation of land and the reconfiguration of land-use rights, legitimised by climate discourses such as nature conservation, carbon offsetting, or renewable energy production (Fairhead et al. 2012). Together, these processes, which we have already seen in action in previous examples, translate into the orchestration of the global energy transition as a new vector of accumulation through the dispossession of land and resources. This perspective, therefore, enables us to connect the multiple local injustices to their global structural determinants (see Figure 1 below).

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 1.** Green colonialism in Africa's energy transition: structures, mechanisms and socio-territorial effects. Source: Author, based on current literature cited in the bibliography.</figcaption></figure>

***Export-oriented energy transitions and global energy justice***

In a sense, the energy transition does not represent a departure from previous economic models. Indeed, a parallel can be drawn with the structural adjustment reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, as renewable energy marks a new wave of liberalisation that will ultimately permanently reshape the energy sector of several African countries. From the increase of independent
producers to public-private international partnerships and the privatisation of entire energy
network segments, these dynamics further open African economies to transnational capital and
promote export-oriented projects designed primarily to serve European and Asian markets and
renewable energy needs (Lang et al. 2024).

Consider, for instance, the recently unsuccessful Xlinks Morocco-UK Power project. Led by the British company Xlinks, the project involved a large solar and wind complex of nearly ten GW in Morocco, connected to Great Britain by a 3,800 km submarine cable to supply up to 8% of the UK's electricity demand. In June 2025, however, the UK government withdrew from the project by refusing to grant the guaranteed purchase contract required for its economic viability, citing technical, geopolitical and financial risks, as well as limited domestic industrial returns. Without such guarantees, the project was suspended before entering the construction phase. But this logic of transnational energy transfer is not unique to Morocco. A comparable dynamic can be observed in the TuNur project in Tunisia, which involves a 2.25 GW solar complex in the south of the country and a 660 km submarine cable intended to export around two GW of electricity to Italy. Led by a Tunisian-British consortium, the project similarly prioritises export to European markets over domestic energy access, despite persistent energy precarity in the region (Hamouchene 2024). Indeed, across the entire African continent, nearly 600 million Africans still lack access to electricity (IEA 2024). Under these circumstances, we may question the export objectives of these large-scale renewable energy projects. They indeed add a distinct layer of global energy injustice to the one described in Section 1, insofar as renewable energy development in Africa contributes only marginally to social inclusion and energy access, despite being central to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7, which aims to ensure access for all to reliable, sustainable, modern and affordable energy services for all.

Furthermore, the scale and structure of the funding mobilised for this type of project are
essential to understanding the nature of power relations and the extent to which they perpetuate
patterns of global domination and internal inequalities. As they remain largely dependent on
capital originating from the Global North, whether channelled through multilateral
development banks, bilateral cooperation agencies, or private investors and multinational
companies, this financial asymmetry significantly constrains recipient states' room for
manoeuvre. However, in contexts marked by high levels of public debt, limited fiscal capacity
and pressing development needs, access to such funding often becomes a political and economic
necessity rather than a freely negotiated choice. This produces forms of constrained adherence,
whereby governments align with externally defined transition strategies not because they fully
correspond to domestic priorities, but because refusal entails substantial opportunity costs in
terms of investment, infrastructure and international legitimacy.

***Internal green colonialism: elites, rentier logics and the promises of green hydrogen***

At that point, nuance is nevertheless essential because green colonialism cannot only be
understood in the context of the Global North-South unequal power relationship. It is also
taking shape within African societies themselves, drawing on internal forces that intersect with
the alliances of domestic elites (political, administrative, and industrial) as well as those of
foreign investors and international elites. In this regard, the discursive framing of green
hydrogen as a pathway to industrialisation in African countries through the development of its
sector constitutes a particularly revealing field for observing the power plays of these various
actors.

Under the rhetoric of international cooperation, the GH₂ sector is progressively reconfiguring coastlines, arid lands, and energy choices in response to external demands (Tunn et al. 2024). While in 2023 tens of billions of dollars had already been invested in the green hydrogen value chain in Africa (Dagnachew et al. 2023), Cezne (2025) argues that this enthusiasm partly stems from a ‘speculative rush’, fuelled by flowery political speeches and institutional narratives disseminated and amplified in major international forums. For instance, he recounts how the 2025 World Hydrogen Summit popularised the idea that clean hydrogen could account for almost 12% of the world’s energy needs by 2050, based on projections by the International Renewable Energy Agency (see IRENA 2022). Such narratives help to normalise the perception that African territories can be used solely for the production and export of this resource, for the good of all, thereby making the fight against global warming appear a fully collective endeavour.

To illustrate further, Tunn and Müller (2023) discuss the concession awarded to the
German-Namibian consortium Hyphen Hydrogen Energy for a $9.4 billion green hydrogen
project in Tsau Khaeb National Park, Namibia. Besides the investment volume equalling the
host country's gross domestic product in 2020, the authors reveal that a national political-
economic elite closely linked to European donors has formed around President Hage Geingob
and Green Hydrogen Commissioner James Mnyupe. In this regard, the project's governance
seems to rely on a small circle of decision-makers from the highest political and administrative
spheres, who, according to the authors, are being accused of nepotism and opacity in contract
and benefit allocation. Likewise, the sector's high capital intensity tends to result in primarily
temporary and low-paid local jobs during the construction phase, while foreign experts fill
qualified operational and maintenance positions. According to several interviewees in Tunn and Müller's study, the situation is comparable to the contract labour system established during colonial times, where a male, low-skilled local workforce is housed in precarious camps around industrial sites, while management and profits escape the territory.

The case of South Africa is also mentioned in the work by Kalt et al. (2023), where the national green hydrogen strategy is rooted in the historic alliance between the state, extractive capital and foreign donors. Major projects, such as the green ammonia complex at Boegoebaai developed by Sasol in the Northern Cape or the Hydrogen Valley large-scale industrial renewable energy project linking Limpopo to Richards Bay, mobilise investments totalling several billion dollars, supported mainly by European multilateral donors. The same study shows that nearly half of the funds listed in the country's Just Energy Transition Investment Plan, an agreement negotiated between the Group of Seven (G7) and South Africa, are directed toward export infrastructure (ports and pipelines) intended to supply the European energy market. These figures, singularly the concentration of flows around European partners, reveal how the energy transition is conceived in several parts of Africa, not as the decentralisation of energy power, but rather as a reconfiguration in favour of already dominant actors.

That said, the concept of green colonialism must also be considered in the context of the continent's specific economic history. In many African countries, revenues from hydrocarbons have long supported rentier economies that create little local value. For Abe and Azubike (2024), this dependence has, over time, shaped powerful and enduring domestic coalitions involving political elites, large industrial groups, and transnational firms in the extractive sector. As Vezzoni (2024) advances, these actors now appear to view renewable sectors as an opportunity to perpetuate extractivist practices, leveraging the assets of previous fossil fuel cycles, including infrastructure, technical expertise, and influence networks. This is evident in Egypt, for instance, where the energy transition explicitly aligns with a rentier economic model. Although nearly 90% of its electricity still comes from fossil fuels, the government aims to establish the country as a global hub for the green hydrogen economy, with projected production of 3.2 million tonnes per year by 2030, of which 2.8 million tonnes are intended for export. Note that this projected volume significantly exceeds current global demand, estimated at less than one million tonnes in 2023 (CAN 2025). To support this strategy, the authorities have already earmarked areas covering around 4% of the country's territory for green hydrogen production infrastructures.

It is essential, however, to recognise that this export-oriented positioning, particularly in the green hydrogen sector, is not always perceived by national decision-makers as
contradictory to domestic development objectives. On the contrary, in several resource-rich African countries, renewable energy is increasingly viewed as a strategic asset that can support existing extractive economies by providing low-carbon energy to mining operations, hydrocarbon production, or the processing of critical minerals. From this perspective, they view the current trends and dynamics as a means of sustaining and legitimising resource-based development models amid tightening global climate constraints and geopolitical conflicts. While this strategy may appear rational in the short term, it ultimately risks reinforcing dependence on volatile commodity markets and delaying the structural transformations required for more inclusive, climate-resilient development trajectories. Consequently, such choices reflect less a commitment to greening national energy systems than a strategy to capture international financial flows, signalling, according to us, the emergence of what could be termed a 'decarbonised public rent', that is, the conversion of the fossil rentier model into a regime of renewable energy exports without significant productive national transformation. Thus, we can observe that African states are not merely passive recipients of decarbonisation agendas, but rather active participants in their articulation and implementation. These elite-driven strategies subsequently contribute to the internalisation of green (neo)colonial dynamics, whereby externally oriented transition pathways are reproduced, sometimes facilitated, and stabilised through domestic coalitions, with uneven and unjust outcomes for the population.

In our view, this orientation invites us to go beyond a simplistic Global North–South divide and to speak also of an ‘internal green colonialism’, based on alliances between national elites and transnational capital that determine the allocation of rents and mechanisms of dispossession amid the massive deployment of renewable energy. The African Hydrogen Alliance (AGHA) illustrates this particularly complex interweaving of actors. Founded in 2022 by six countriesvii, it presents itself as a South–South initiative aimed at structuring the sector. In practice, however, it is closely linked to and influenced by the priorities and funding of the Global North, particularly the European Union, which has been further reinforced in recent years by the post-Ukraine geopolitical context. The production geographies of GH₂ in Africa are thus primarily shaped in Europe through demand instruments (such as strategies and purchase contracts), network arrangements (including interconnections), and financing mechanisms (with their associated implicit conditions) that direct investments towards exports (Dagnachew et al. 2025). All of this ultimately reveals a strong dialectic between energy transition and sovereignty, which, in reality, traces a clear continuum with an asymmetrical multilateralism, or a historical extroversion of African economies, namely Africa’s structural orientation towards external markets.
Nevertheless, nuancing this diagnosis remains essential. While the combined effects of external dependency and internal elite alliances significantly and increasingly shape African energy trajectories, they do not imply an absence of independent national initiatives; that is, without the support of international donors. Instead, such initiatives often remain fragile and constrained by institutional fragmentation, limited coordination, and uneven political commitment<sup>viii</sup>.

***Epistemic, technological and temporal lock-ins in the energy transition***

The complex and intertwined dynamics examined above suggest that African energy transitions are structured by a constrained environment in which global power relations intersect with specific internal political and institutional gaps. Within this configuration, what we call neoliberal green colonialism crystallises as the current hegemonic governance regime for the transition, reproducing historically constituted relations of domination embedded in the architecture of international development and thereby limiting the transformative potential of contemporary energy transitions across the continent. A key aspect of this constraint is the lack of control over the necessary technological knowledge, particularly the concentration of patents, know-how, and intellectual property rights in green technologies, as well as the still-inadequate investment in the research and development they require. Through these epistemic lock-ins, norms, techno-economic references, and other decarbonation imperatives produced in the Global North, public and private actions in the Global South are shaped, thus turning the energy transition into an instrument of control and subjugation (Dagnachew et al. 2025). This point is manifest in Nigeria, for instance, where some imported green technologies often require annual intervention by German engineers to remain operational (Abe and Azubike 2024).

This asymmetric relationship also pertains to the temporality of energy transitions themselves. While the countries of the Global North initiated the first decarbonisation processes over a decade ago, many African states are still in the initial stages of planning or implementation. This creates a temporal dualism that enables the Global North to set the pace, capture innovations and gain competitive advantages. At the same time, the Global South is forced to follow an imposed trajectory that often comes at the cost of significant social and ecological sacrifices (see Rihi 2025), a gap frequently attributed, for that matter, to cultural or institutional factors, such as political instability or administrative weaknesses in African states, generally presented as obstacles to investment predictability and security.

While this multitude of factors undoubtedly play a role, as we have seen, they cannot be separated from the historical and structural conditions that gave rise to them and contribute to
perpetuating them, such as financial dependencies inherited from 1980s adjustment programmes, institutional fragmentation caused by subsequent pro-market reforms, the prioritisation of international aid conditionalities over national interests, etc. Under these circumstances, the argument of instability functions less as an explanation and more as a mechanism to legitimise current asymmetries that are fundamentally historically constituted.

To conclude this section, **Table 2** synthesises the main driving forces discussed above, highlighting how external and internal forms of neoliberal green colonialism operate across different levels of analysis whilst underpinning many of the distributive, procedural, restorative, and recognition injustices analysed in Section I.

<table><caption>**Table 2. Driving forces shaping renewable energy projects in Africa.**</caption><thead><tr><td>Level of analysis</td><td>Driving forces</td><td>Forms of green colonialism</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Global / geopolitical</td><td>Decarbonisation consensus; European energy security strategies; asymmetrical climate and development finance; epistemic and technological dominance</td><td>External</td></tr><tr><td>Financial / institutional</td><td>Dependence on Global North capital; conditional and multilateral project-based funding; limited access to alternative financing</td><td>External</td></tr><tr><td>National / state level</td><td>Elite capture; continuity of rentier logics; strategic use of renewables to sustain extractive economies; decarbonised public rent</td><td>Internal</td></tr><tr><td>Territorial / local</td><td>Green land grabbing; land reclassification; enclosure of commons; infrastructural zoning</td><td>Combined (external-internal)</td></tr><tr><td>Energy systems</td><td>Export-oriented mega-projects; systemic marginalisation of decentralised solutions; continued fossil fuel lock-in for domestic uses</td><td>Combined (external-internal)</td></tr></tbody></table>

*Source: Author, based on current literature cited in the bibliography.*

## Conclusion

Ultimately, the apparent international consensus on the necessity of collective energy transition efforts tends to obscure the differentiated implications these transformations entail, especially for the African continent, which is increasingly becoming a central arena of global decarbonisation strategies. Present trends point to an accelerated and largely unreflexive push towards renewable energy deployment, a veritable headlong rush, within which Africa progressively emerges as a geographical blind spot, exposed to a range of externalities. Building on an emerging yet fragmented body of literature and grounding the analysis in current dynamics observed across Africa's renewable energy sector, this text has sought to refine the
analytical category of ‘green colonialism’. It advances the notion of neoliberal green colonialism to capture how the costs of renewable energy infrastructures are disproportionately borne by marginalised, rural and historically colonised populations across the African continent.

As the analysis has shown, neoliberal green colonialism operates simultaneously at the discursive and practical levels. It is rooted in both external Global North–South relations and internal political and economic forces within African societies, and increasingly permeates contemporary energy transition strategies. This particular configuration underscores the need to reassess the prevailing geopolitics of decarbonisation, which are currently unfolding at the expense of equitable, territorially grounded planning and, most often, in contradiction with the social, economic and energy needs of affected territories.

At its core, this is a matter of political arbitration, by governments and institutions in both developed and African countries, over the societal objectives that renewable energy transitions are meant to serve. Rather than being primarily shaped by donor priorities, export imperatives or geopolitical competition, energy transitions would need to be re-anchored in domestic political arenas, where socio-territorial and environmental demands can be articulated, negotiated and prioritised. This, however, implies approaching renewable energy not only as an economic resource or a tool of geopolitical positioning, but also as a common good and, potentially, as a universal social right. More broadly, the injustices documented throughout this article are not unintended side effects of an otherwise desirable transformation but rather the outcome of transition pathways structured by historically constituted uneven power relations and contemporary development practices. Thus, it invites a more comprehensive and reflexive understanding of the structural transformations currently underway in Africa, and of the distributional conflicts they generate.

That said, under present conditions, where decarbonisation remains governed by asymmetrical geopolitical arrangements, technocratic decision-making, and extractivist development logics, the promise of a truly just and transformative energy transition for Africa remains unrealised. Highlighting the limitations of current trajectories is therefore not an exercise in pessimism, but a necessary step toward imagining and building alternative energy futures capable of reconciling climate objectives with justice, sovereignty and inclusive development.

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<footnote>i The field of energy justice builds on classical theories of social justice, incorporating social concerns that historically arose from trade union movements. It has developed around four main dimensions: distributive, procedural, restorative and recognition. See the work of Jenkins et al. (2016) and Sovacool and Dworkin (2015).</footnote>

<footnote>ii Green hydrogen is produced through the electrolysis of water using renewable energy sources.</footnote>

<footnote>iii M-KOPA Solar is a company that sells solar home kits on credit in Kenya. Customers make an initial payment of around $35, followed by daily payments of $0.45 via mobile phone, less than the average annual expenditure on kerosene, which is around $200. After one year, the family becomes the owner of the system. According to the company, since 2011, over 630,000 families in East Africa have benefited from this initiative. See: https://www.triodos-im.com/articles/projects/m-kopa-solar</footnote>

<footnote>iv Solar Sister provides training and support to rural women entrepreneurs in Africa, helping them to distribute solar lamps and clean cookstoves. The organisation's model combines access to energy with economic empowerment. To date, more than 12,000 women have enabled 5.5 million people to access clean energy, resulting in savings of approximately $222 million and preventing over two million tonnes of CO2 emissions. These initiatives also contributes to improving women's health, education and social status within their communities. See: https://solarsister.org/what-we-do/our-model/.</footnote>

<footnote>v In this regard, community initiatives are not marginal to the system, but rather an interesting lever for building more resilient, equitable and territory-specific energy models.</footnote>

<footnote>vi To trace the history of the concept of green colonialism in Africa from the 19th century to the present day, see Blanc (2022). For contemporary analyses of this dynamic, which place green colonialism at the heart of global energy transition strategies, see Lang et al. (2024) and Hamouchene (2023).</footnote>

<footnote>vii Egypt, Kenya, Mauritania, Morocco, Namibia and South Africa.</footnote>

<footnote>viii For instance, in Burkina Faso, national strategies to diversify the energy mix remain largely at the planning stage, constrained by inter-ministerial tensions and weak territorial integration</footnote>
(Gatete et al. 2024). Similarly, in Benin, local solar governance remains embryonic despite the presence of multiple actors involved, whose limited inclusion in decision-making hampers the emergence of territorialised transition dynamics (Beaurain and Amoussou 2016).