The climate transition is often framed as a technical, scientific or financial challenge – about how we develop technologies to address climate change, or how we mobilise the enormous financial resources required for the transition, recently estimated at about $4-trillion per annum globally.
But at its core, climate change is fundamentally a human issue. It is about how societies reorganise economic and social life within the limits imposed by our natural environment. One key dimension of this human challenge is ownership.
There is a persistent assumption in public debates that private investment must dominate renewable energy. In South Africa, the failures of many state-owned enterprises have reinforced this narrative. Yet international experience suggests something rather different: in many successful economies, public, cooperative and community ownership is not the exception, but an important feature of key sectors, including energy.
Take Switzerland. Its economy is often portrayed as a model of market capitalism, yet some of its most important firms are not privately owned in the conventional sense. The country’s two largest retailers, Migros and Coop, are both cooperatives owned by their members.
Together, they have millions of members – about 2.3 million in Migros alone and around 2.5 million in Coop – who collectively own and govern these enterprises.
These are not marginal entities. They are among the largest firms in Switzerland, with tens of billions of Swiss francs in annual turnover and tens of thousands of employees. Their significance lies not only in their scale, but in their governance structures, which embed social objectives within economic activity.
Lessons from working models in the energy industries
Importantly, this model extends into energy. Switzerland has a long tradition of cooperative utilities. One example is Primeo Energie, a cooperative electricity supplier serving about 230,000 people. More broadly, Switzerland has hundreds of energy cooperatives involved in electricity generation and distribution.
Nor is this unique to Switzerland. Across Europe, thousands of renewable energy cooperatives operate successfully, particularly in countries such as Germany and Denmark.
Denmark, widely regarded as a global leader in renewable energy, provides an especially important example. The Danish transition was not built solely on large private firms.
Instead, it was driven by deliberate policies that encouraged community and cooperative ownership of wind energy. By the early 2000s, more than 100,000 Danish households were members of wind cooperatives, and these cooperatives owned a substantial share of the country’s wind turbines.
The scale of participation mattered politically and socially. The well-known Middelgrunden offshore wind farm, near Copenhagen, was developed through a partnership between municipal authorities and a local cooperative, with thousands of citizens directly investing in the project.
This broad ownership base has gone hand-in-hand with extraordinary energy outcomes.
Denmark is now among the world leaders in renewable electricity generation, with wind power playing a central role in its electricity system.
The relationship between ownership and outcomes is not accidental. Denmark’s success reflects deliberate policy choices. Guaranteed grid access, feed-in tariffs and tax incentives were designed not only to accelerate renewable energy deployment, but also to broaden ownership and public participation.
Private capital remains essential to financing the transition – but not in exclusion
The lesson is clear. Public and collective ownership is not necessarily a constraint on efficiency. In many contexts, it has strengthened both the pace of renewable energy deployment and public support for the transition. These investments are also highly efficient.
For South Africa, the implications are profound. We enter the energy transition as one of the most unequal societies in the world. If ownership of renewable energy assets is concentrated among a narrow group of private investors, the transition risks deepening inequality. The emerging green economy could become another enclave: capital-intensive, exclusive and socially contested. And, importantly, it will lack legitimacy.
Indeed, there is already some research on South Africa’s renewable energy procurement programme that suggests that efforts to build local industrial capacity and broaden ownership opportunities for communities have had only limited success. As colleagues and I argued in a recent analysis, while the renewable energy programme has succeeded in attracting investment and adding generation capacity, its developmental and ownership outcomes have been far more uneven.
International experience suggests that public and collective ownership can help align the transition with broader developmental goals. It allows the economic benefits from renewable energy – particularly from solar and wind, where operating costs are relatively low – to be shared more broadly. It enables municipalities to generate revenue, communities to build assets and citizens to participate directly in the energy system.
This is not an argument against private investment. Private capital will remain essential to financing the transition. Rather, it is an argument for plural ownership structures. The international evidence suggests that the most successful transitions combine private investment with strong forms of public, municipal and cooperative ownership.
The stakes are political as much as economic. Large-scale structural change requires legitimacy. Denmark’s experience demonstrates that when citizens are owners, rather than merely consumers, support for renewable energy deepens. People are more likely to embrace change when they share directly in its benefits.
South Africa cannot afford a transition that is economically efficient but socially brittle. A just transition must be seen to be just, and it must deliver visible benefits to a broad spectrum of society.
The international evidence – from Switzerland’s cooperative economy to Denmark’s citizen-owned wind revolution – points in a clear direction. If we want a transition that is both rapid and equitable, ownership cannot be left entirely to the market.
We must build a renewable energy system that is not only clean, but shared. Who owns the assets of the future will help determine whether South Africa achieves a genuinely just transition, or merely a transition that reproduces and deepens existing inequalities. DM
