By Britta Klagge, Benedikt Walker, Clemens Greiner (Project C02 Energy Futures) and Linus Kalvelage (Project C01 Future in Chains). This publication comes shorty after Benedikt Walker and Linus Kalvelage were recently featured in an article by The Namibian, contributing expert insights on the socio-economic and environmental implications of green hydrogen development in Namibia.
Abstract
The green-hydrogen sector has created considerable expectations in the Global South about export-oriented development and industrial path creation. However, whether and how these expectations are really materializing requires further scrutiny. This article develops a conceptual approach that we call governance of future-making. Thereby, we want to understand how actors try to coordinate their expectations about future economic development in different contexts and across scales over time. We conceptualize the emergence of newregional development trajectories as resulting from the use of governance instruments with an increasing bindingness, which reflect the interplay between governance of and by expectations. Based on this approach, we analyze and compare green-hydrogen activities in Namibia and South Africa. We find that future-making is becoming more binding in both countries but has not resulted in path creation yet.
Reference
Klagge, B., Walker, B., Kalvelage, L., Greiner, C. 2025. Governance of future-making: Green hydrogen in Namibia and South Africa. Geoforum, 161. DOI
