Hedging energy transition: Green hydrogen, oil, and low-carbon resilience as state strategy in Namibia

Abstract

• Conventional accounts characterize energy transition as inherently productive of resilience. • Namibia's dual pursuit of oil and green hydrogen contradicts conventional understandings of low-carbon resilience. • This article re-conceptualizes low-carbon resilience as variant, situated, and political. • Hedging strategies are rational responses to structural constraints, but they are likely to ultimately undermine resilience. Policy frameworks increasingly portray energy transition as a mechanism for achieving a range of resilience-related goals, including socio-economic development and energy security. Energy transition is often characterized as a particularly important resilience strategy for lower-income states in the Global South, which face the simultaneous challenges of decarbonization and development. Yet these states, many of which have fossil fuel resources, face distinct constraints and risks in navigating energy transition, including the possibility that promised funding for low-carbon energy projects will never come to fruition or that global decarbonization will be deferred or abandoned completely. This article uses the case study of Namibia to challenge linear, universalizing, and unambiguous narratives of low-carbon resilience, a term I reconceptualize here to refer to the variant, situated, and political relationships between energy transition and resilience. Specifically, I examine how and why the Namibian government has developed a seemingly paradoxical strategy for low-carbon resilience, which leverages new oil extraction to fund the country’s low-carbon industrial development via green hydrogen. Drawing on qualitative analysis over three years, I argue that, far from paradoxical, Namibia’s 'hedging' strategy is a pragmatic response to the structural constraints faced by lower-income, resource-rich Global South states. Yet despite its design as a hedge against multi-faceted and multi-scalar risks, I contend that Namibia's attempt to 'play both sides' of energy transition is likely to ultimately undermine its goal of resilience by compounding existing socio-economic and structural challenges. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the pursuit of equitable decarbonization and development in an unequal world.

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