What does a “just transition” actually look like on the ground?
At the Photovoice Stories of Water and Energy exhibition at the Isivivana Centre in Khayelitsha, this question was explored not through policy frameworks or technical models, but through the lived experiences of small businesses and communities navigating access to basic services. Organised by the Politics and Urban Governance Research Group, the exhibition offered a compelling lens into how water and energy access is experienced, and what this means for the transition.
For those working in the energy transition space, it was a timely reminder: transitions are not only planned, they are lived.
From policy to lived experience
In the energy transition space, conversations often centre on systems: grids, tariffs, infrastructure planning etc. But the exhibition was a reminder that transitions are ultimately lived, not just implemented.
Through the Photovoice method, participants used photography to document their everyday realities. As one speaker reflected, “if you give people a camera, they tell us what we need to know.” The images didn’t just show challenges, they revealed how people experience, navigate, and respond to them.
Professor Charlotte Lemanski’s framing of infrastructural citizenship stood out here: the idea that how people access services like energy and water shapes their relationship with the state. In this sense, access is not just technical, it is deeply political and social.
Energy access beyond the grid
The stories shared by participants highlighted a dimension of energy access that often sits outside formal systems.
For some small business owners, electricity is not reliably available through formal connections. Instead, it is informally sourced, sometimes rented, illegally connected, often at high cost and significant risk.
In one case, an early childhood development centre operates without formal electricity, relying on unsafe and inconsistent alternatives in a flood-prone area. In another, a local eatery depends on fire and cooler boxes to function, with tragic consequences emerging from unsafe electrical connections in the community.
These are not simply service delivery gaps, they are indicators of how people are already adapting to energy constraints in ways that are precarious, informal, and, at times, dangerous.
For those of us working on energy transitions, this raises important questions:
- What does a “transition” mean in contexts where access itself is still insecure?
- How do we account for informal systems that people rely on to meet basic needs?
- And how can future energy solutions respond to these lived realities, rather than bypass them?