Does decarbonization depend on policy stability that makes climate policies and institutional development irreversible, or does it depend on mastering a messy political conflict with uneven progress that might be inherent in large political economy transitions? This chapter draws on case studies of two large emerging powers, Brazil and South Africa, to argue that politicization of climate action seems inevitable in decarbonizing energy transitions. Fossil fuel coalitions are too powerful and the threat to them too existential to avoid politicization as they defend their interests. At the same time, Brazil shows that policy stability was a critical step in a large expansion of wind power there – not a full energy transition itself but providing an important alternative to fossil fuels. Both countries show that allies in the struggle against fossil fuels can be won and lost in non-climate political economies of energy transition. The potential for new industry and job creation, enhanced energy security, and impacts on communities that host infrastructure are all important to energy transition, with each following a political economy logic that may or may not focus on climate change.

This chapter presents the book’s major insight: no single “energy transition” takes place as countries contemplate adding wind and solar power. Rather, the issue convokes a variety of state and societal actors responding to the interests and institutions associated with four different policy arenas: climate change, industrial policy, electricity service provision, and the siting of infrastructure projects in communities. As the book shows, national energy transition results from the intersection of these arenas; some push transition forward; others hold it back. The chapter previews the overarching empirical argument that South Africa’s reliance on fossil fuel for electricity meant that climate concerns presented the sector with an existential threat, leading it to challenge energy transition on industrial policy and cost/consumption grounds, in a politicized process. Meanwhile, electricity’s small role in Brazil’s climate emissions led to a less politicized process: a series of national bureaucracies followed discrete standard procedures in interaction with just a few business/citizen groups, with industrial policy and cost concerns most influential in Brazil’s overall outcomes.

All infrastructure projects need to be placed in particular locations, and host communities typically have local populations, economies, and ecosystems that will be affected. The literature is divided, with energy and economic scholars tending to emphasize local benefits while geographers, anthropologists, and environmental scholars tend to highlight local costs. This chapter examines how local communities in Brazil and South Africa responded to new wind and solar power installations, asking not just about their preferences but also how (and if) they were able to mobilize resources and respond. Environmental impact assessment and land-use policies set a broad framework for these questions. New research conducted for the book finds that communities resisted wind power plants in about a quarter of the 77 Brazilian cities that hosted them, most in Brazil’s poor Northeastern region, especially in an early generation of poorly chosen coastal sites. There was little community protest against solar power in Brazil. South Africa saw little community protest against wind or solar power installations, though national organization BirdLife South Africa did strongly influence siting decisions.

The primary theoretical claim in this book is that “an” energy transition is actually a series of political economy transitions. The prospect of energy transition convokes actors and disputes in at least four policy arenas. Each has a different interest structure that should generate the participation of particular, different state and society actors. These interact with the country’s more conjunctural features and coalitional struggles to produce the actual dynamics of each political economy. The four may not push in the same direction; nor are they necessarily moving at the same pace. As a result, it is necessary to set them together, to see where one may exaggerate or undermine the outcomes of another. This chapter summarizes the basic logic of each policy arena then shows how they fit together in a bureaucracy-dominant transition in Brazil and a highly polarized and politicized impasse in South Africa. The chapter also explores how these political economies are likely to appear in other middle-income and developing countries and suggests the broader usefulness of this conceptualization of modes of national energy transitions.

Citizens expect their states to provide basic electricity services, of acceptable price and quality. Wind and solar power have affected that by making electricity accessible for additional consumers, especially through local generation of solar power (distributed solar power), even as their prices have often been much higher than alternative electricity sources. This chapter examines how the Brazilian and South African states used wind and solar power to provide electricity services to their household and industry consumers. As electricity access was nearly universal in Brazil, wind and solar power’s primary contribution was to supply grid-scale electricity, along with a small number of solar installations for remote consumers. Growing controversies focus on the subsidies to small-scale generation and increased urban self-provision. In South Africa, wind and solar power entered a highly unequal electricity system – 32 companies used 40 percent of the electricity while the apartheid government had left Black South Africans unserved – and have done little to redress the inequalities. The same coalitions fought over the true price of electricity options as prices rose precipitously.

Early adopters of wind and solar power often chose these forms of electricity becasue they have few greenhouse gas emissions. This chapter suggests that a climate framing of electricity choices is threatening to incumbent fossil fuel sources of electricity as it implies that they must be curtailed to meet climate ambitions. The chapter has a theoretical focus on state capacity: in the positive sense that states must be able to plan for long-term interests like climate change and in the negative sense that states must be able to take on powerful actors for whom such action is an existential threat. This policy arena separates the two cases. South Africa has depended on coal-powered electricity provided by a powerful state-owned enterprise, Eskom, and built strong economic sectors around it. These fought hard against adopting wind and solar power; further headwinds came from the government’s corrupt preference for nuclear power. In contrast, given its hydropower, Brazilian climate politics was heated over deforestation, not electricity choices. Wind, but not solar power, was unproblematically added to annual electricity planning – a decision that defies the climate lens.

Electricity decision-makers often choose to build wind and solar power for economic reasons. Renewable energy development may lead to economic growth, innovation in new sectors, and better employment options. This chapter examines which industrial policies states might choose to encourage these outcomes and whether Brazil and South Africa were successful in this. When private firms are involved – both countries chose private companies to build most of their electricity, through procurement auctions – it creates significant rents for the sector that must be managed to ensurecollective rather than narrow benefits. This chapter works within theoretical literatures on state–business relations. Brazil uses an initial local requirements stage and later public finance to encourage strong growth in wind power installation and manufacturing. The difficulty in developing a solar power industry accounts for its puzzling delay. In South Africa, similar coalitions as in Chapter 2 fight about whether the public or the private sector should produce renewable energy, pitting the powerful labor movement against the state’s industrial policies, in the absence of effective just transition policies.