False benevolence of climate justice — billions for COP, crumbs for communities

As the world’s climate justice industry gathers in Antalya, Türkiye, for yet another COP conference, the poor of Theunissen, in South Africa’s Free State, remain exactly where the global development establishment has always found them: on the margins of prosperity, excluded from decisions about their future and available to be consulted whenever another institution needs to demonstrate its commitment to justice.There is something profoundly perverse about an international system capable of mobilising billions to address the suffering of marginalised communities, while remaining apparently incapable of ensuring that those same people exercise meaningful power over developments taking place on their doorstep.Across the world, government delegations, international and local NGOs, consultants, researchers and corporate representatives assemble to negotiate humanity’s climate future. They speak earnestly about inclusion, participation and leaving nobody behind. They produce declarations, frameworks and funding commitments, congratulating one another on the progress achieved.Meanwhile, in places such as Theunissen, the transition to renewable energy is taking place amid persistent poverty and exclusion, with communities struggling to secure meaningful influence over the development supposedly intended to deliver a more just future.This contradiction exposes what Mining Affected Communities United in Action (Macua) calls the false benevolence economy: an elaborate and increasingly lucrative system in which managing poverty and exclusion has become more institutionally rewarding than eliminating them.Green energy, old inequalityThe Sonvanger Solar Power Plant near Theunissen offers a particularly revealing illustration of this contradiction. The project represents precisely the kind of investment celebrated at international climate conferences. Renewable electricity is being generated, private capital is being mobilised, and the energy transition is advancing.Yet the communities surrounding the development have spent months attempting to secure meaningful engagement over how the project might contribute to their social and economic development.Through the local Macua branch, communities have sought a community development agreement that would establish transparent, accountable and enforceable arrangements for determining development priorities and sharing benefits.The project’s own social and human rights assessments recognise the importance of community participation, transparency and inclusive decision-making. Yet translating these principles into binding community governance arrangements has proved far more difficult than producing documents affirming their importance.Sonvanger has maintained that its status as a private, commercial energy project places it outside the community-benefit requirements applicable to projects procured under South Africa’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme.This may distinguish its specific legal obligations, but it raises a profoundly disturbing question: does justice cease to be relevant when a renewable energy project supplies a private commercial customer rather than participating in a government procurement programme?If the answer is yes, then the Just Energy Transition is not a commitment to transforming unequal social relations. It is merely a regulatory arrangement through which certain projects acquire social obligations while others can operate without equivalent requirements.The result is a familiar South African story: investment flourishes, infrastructure expands, profits accumulate and surrounding communities are left negotiating for benefits from economic activity taking place in their midst.The technology may have changed from mining to solar generation, but the underlying distribution of power remains disturbingly recognisable.Travelling representatives of the poorDignitaries gather for COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye. (Photo: Kiara Worth / UN Climate) Against this reality, the annual COP spectacle becomes increasingly difficult to stomach.Every year, professional climate justice advocates travel across continents, ostensibly to defend the interests of the very communities that remain excluded from decisions about their own development.They attend panels on community empowerment, participate in dialogues on inclusive transitions and return with renewed declarations about the importance of grassroots participation.But who appointed these organisations to represent the poor? To whom are they accountable? How much of the funding mobilised in the name of frontline communities actually reaches independent, community-controlled institutions?And perhaps most importantly, what measurable redistribution of power has resulted from decades of conferences, consultations and advocacy?Convenient fiction of consultation without powerPerhaps the greatest achievement of the modern development industry has been securing broad acceptance of an extraordinary false premise: that consultation, even when divorced from any meaningful transfer of power, can somehow produce more just outcomes.Entire funding ecosystems have developed around stakeholder mapping, community dialogues, participatory assessments, capacity building, social safeguards and consultation frameworks. Millions are spent documenting what impoverished communities already know about their circumstances.Consultants are appointed. Workshops are convened. Reports are produced. Communities are invited to explain their suffering, often to institutions that have already determined the boundaries within which their futures may be negotiated.And when the process concludes, those who controlled the resources before consultation generally continue controlling them afterwards.The cognitive dissonance is staggering. An industry that claims to be committed to dismantling structural inequality has built an elaborate economic ecosystem around processes that leave the underlying distribution of power largely untouched. Worse still, the institutions that champion these processes are frequently the very institutions whose funding, relevance and professional existence depend upon their continuation.This is the defining contradiction of the false benevolence economy. The persistence of exclusion generates the justification for further consultation, which in turn generates further funding, institutional growth and professional opportunities, without necessarily bringing communities any closer to controlling the decisions that shape their lives.What is presented as a pathway to justice can therefore become a self-reinforcing system for administering injustice, where the appearance of progress substitutes for structural transformation.Consultation without decision-making authority is not empowerment. It is the administration of exclusion.Communities are recognised as vulnerable, consulted as stakeholders and celebrated as beneficiaries, but rarely treated as legitimate holders of political and economic power. Their voices are welcomed so long as they do not fundamentally challenge who owns, who decides and who benefits.In this way, the language of justice becomes an instrument for managing demands for justice, while the institutions claiming to advance emancipation become increasingly invested in the very arrangements that make emancipation necessary.These questions do not deny the contribution of genuinely committed civil society organisations. Many have undertaken important work exposing environmental injustice and challenging corporate impunity.But good intentions cannot become a permanent exemption from accountability.An increasingly professionalised NGO sector has emerged in which proximity to international institutions, donor networks and policy platforms can become more valuable than organic accountability to the communities supposedly being represented.The result is a remarkable inversion of the principles of justice.Those who speak about marginalisation acquire resources, visibility and institutional influence, while those experiencing marginalisation remain dependent on the goodwill of intermediaries.The suffering of the poor becomes an institutional asset, generating funding, professional opportunities and political legitimacy for organisations whose continued relevance depends upon the persistence of the very injustices they claim to confront.This does not require deliberate dishonesty. It is the predictable consequence of an institutional system that rewards the performance of solidarity more readily than the redistribution of power.Who benefits from the billions?Tea is served to visitors at the Saudi Arabia pavilion on the opening day of COP31 in Antalya, Turkey. (Photo: Tolga Akmen / EPA)The global climate finance agenda is now organised around mobilising financing on a trillion-dollar scale. The urgency is real, and the developing world has every reason to demand that wealthy countries honour their climate obligations.But the magnitude of financial commitments tells us remarkably little about their redistributive consequences. Money continues to flow through international banks, private developers, consultancy firms and NGO intermediaries without meaningfully changing the lives of the communities whose vulnerability provides the moral justification for mobilising it.The question is therefore not simply how much climate finance is available, but who controls it, who benefits from it, and whether it dismantles or reproduces existing inequalities.South Africa’s history should have taught us this lesson.For more than a century, mining companies extracted extraordinary wealth while surrounding communities endured dispossession, environmental destruction and poverty. Development commitments and corporate social responsibility programmes did little to alter the fundamental relationship between those who controlled productive resources and those who bore the consequences.We are now witnessing the reproduction of that arrangement under the banner of environmental sustainability.The sun may provide cleaner energy than coal, but it does not automatically produce a more just economy.Justice cannot be outsourcedThe real test of COP31 will not be the elegance of its declarations, the sophistication of its financing frameworks or the number of organisations claiming to represent marginalised communities.It will be whether the global climate agenda begins to confront the unequal distribution of power that makes those communities marginal in the first place.That means enforceable community development agreements, direct financing of community-controlled institutions, meaningful authority over development decisions and accountability from NGOs, corporations and governments alike.It means recognising communities not as passive beneficiaries of benevolence, but as political actors entitled to determine their own futures.The people of Theunissen do not need another international conference to discover that they are poor. They do not need another consultant to document their exclusion or another NGO to explain their vulnerability to the world.They need the power to influence the economic decisions being made around them.Perhaps the greatest indictment of the global climate justice industry is that it has become far more comfortable financing the management of injustice than financing its abolition.Until that changes, COP will remain an annual celebration of good intentions, while the poor continue receiving the crumbs of a green economy built in their name. DM