Driving sustainable energy futures: Lessons from India and South Africa energy transition strategies

<p dir="ltr">This paper offers a novel comparative perspective on the energy transitions of India and South Africa, two coaldependent developing economies facing similar structural challenges but with sharply divergent outcomes.<br>Unlike existing single-country analyses or descriptive policy reviews, our study develops an integrated<br>comparative framework that distinguishes between structural constraints (coal reliance, ageing infrastructure,<br>and grid reliability issues) and enabling factors (policy sequencing, institutional capacity, governance arrangements, and political economy dynamics). This approach reveals that India’s coherent sequencing of renewable<br>and rural electrification policies, supported by large-scale solar and wind deployment and the political influence<br>of rural constituencies, generated synergistic effects that accelerated universal electricity access. In contrast,<br>South Africa’s centralized governance model, institutional bottlenecks, and reliance on an ageing coal fleet<br>limited responsiveness to growing access demands. Importantly, the analysis also interrogates contested claims –<br>such as engineering-based efficiency estimates – by incorporating empirical evidence of the “energy efficiency<br>gap,” thereby strengthening the validity of our findings. By combining critical assessment of policy implementation with cross-country benchmarking, this paper makes a novel contribution to the literature on just and<br>sustainable transitions, offering fresh insights into how institutional design and political economy dynamics<br>shape energy transition outcomes in developing economies.<br></p>