By Jiayi Wang and Mengjie Xu
When COP30 ended in the Amazonian city of Belém, much of the global media focus stayed locked on a familiar question: would the final agreement clearly call for the “phasing out of fossil fuels”? The newly created Belém Action Mechanism (BAM) — the first formal attempt to place workers, communities and unions inside climate governance — looked like a breakthrough. Yet behind the scenes, many negotiators shared the same concern: without new funding, clear responsibility and binding rules, BAM may become more symbol than protection.
Belém, however, marked a deeper shift. It quietly moved the centre of “just transition” away from the Global North — where climate finance remains uncertain and politically fragile — and placed it squarely on the Global South. For countries that are expanding renewables, managing coal dependence, facing stronger climate shocks and relying heavily on informal labour, the core issue has never been whether decarbonisation will happen. The real question is who will pay the social price.
South-South cooperation is accelerating the decarbonisation process—yet shaping new hierarchies
If one reads only the official statements, COP30 looked much like earlier summits: calls for climate finance, appeals for cooperation and familiar phrases about shared responsibility. Yet some of the most important shifts are now taking place outside the UN’s formal negotiation rooms. Just-transition debates increasingly extend into areas such as critical minerals, clean-tech supply chains and industrial policy. At the same time, countries are signing regional and bilateral deals on batteries, electric vehicles, wind power and hydrogen. This signals an important change: the real drivers of decarbonisation now lie as much in markets and production networks as in diplomatic texts.
China’s clean-tech expansion shows this most clearly. Large exports of solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles have helped push down renewable energy costs across much of the Global South. Backed by state finance, Chinese firms now play a growing role in deciding where and how green infrastructure is built. Compared with multilateral development banks — long the main source of energy finance — China’s manufacturing scale and supply chains increasingly shape investment choices. India’s International Solar Alliance now supports solar planning in more than 80 developing countries, while Indonesia and South Africa are testing coal-to-clean strategies that rely heavily on Asian partners rather than European or US public funds. The emerging simple truth is: today’s most active centres of green industrial growth are found in the Global South itself.
Yet beneath this South–South surge lies a more uneasy reality. The Global South is not one united or equal group. A new green hierarchy is forming. China leads in high-value manufacturing and core technologies; Southeast Asia is becoming a major centre for processing and assembly; Africa is still largely supplying cobalt, lithium and nickel, often under conditions that resemble older resource-extracting models. Brazil’s push into green hydrogen risks falling into familiar commodity traps. Competition is also rising within these groupings — from battery production to mineral partnerships and EV assembly.
This leaves a difficult question unanswered by COP30: can South–South cooperation truly be “just” if it repeats old patterns of unequal value sharing? BAM speaks the language of solidarity, yet the green economy is starting to look like a new version of globalisation — one where a few rising industrial powers shape markets and capture profits, while many others stay on the margins. The justice gap between Global South countries may soon matter as much as the gap between North and South.
Domestic Inequalities: The hidden core of the just transition challenge
Throughout COP30, talk of green jobs, clean industries and “people-centred transitions” filled plenary halls, side events and policy meetings. However, across the Global South, the social foundations needed to carry this transition remain fragile. The rapid spread of renewable energy is colliding with labour markets shaped by widespread informal work, weak social protection, gender inequality and deep regional gaps.
The most invisible—yet most affected—people in this transition are informal and contract workers, who make up most of the workforce in many developing countries. These workers often have no union protection, no severance pay, no access to retraining, and no say in how the transition unfolds. Across parts of Asia and Africa, early coal-plant closures—or delayed shutdowns tied to rigid power-purchase contracts—are putting these workers at serious risk. Even where renewable energy is expanding, such as in Morocco, early signs suggest that while headline job numbers may look impressive, stable long-term employment for local communities remains uncertain. Without deep reform, the green transition risks becoming an economic shock that falls hardest on those with the least protection.
A growing skills gap is making exclusion even worse. Across much of the Global South, large-scale retraining programmes are far behind the speed of new energy construction. Workers leaving coal are often offered training that is limited, poorly funded and disconnected from real local job markets. Some—especially older workers—choose early retirement instead, only to discover that pension and welfare systems cannot properly support them. As a result, renewable-energy projects often hire skilled workers from outside the region, while local people are left with only short-term, low-paid construction work—or no jobs at all. The result is a paradox: green growth can reduce carbon emissions while at the same time deepening regional and skills-based inequality, when training, welfare and local industry are treated as afterthoughts.
Skill and gender gaps further deepen these divides. Clean-energy industries favour engineers, technicians and digital specialists—jobs more often held by younger, urban men. Many mid-career fossil-fuel workers lack the training or mobility to make this shift. Women remain heavily under-represented across clean-energy supply chains. If “just transition” is to mean more than a slogan, it cannot rely on the hope that good green jobs will naturally appear where they are most needed. It requires political choices on education, labour rights and long-term industrial planning.
COP30’s decision to include unions within BAM carries symbolic meaning, but symbols alone do not change power. In many Global South countries, unions still lack the legal authority, financial independence and reach needed to bargain with large state-owned or multinational energy firms. If the new green economy is governed in the same top-down way as the old one, then new mechanisms risk creating participation without real influence.
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of the EADI Debating Development Blog or the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes
Jiayi Wang is a doctoral researcher at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester working on green industry and just transition. You can reach her at jiayi.wang-40@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk.
Mengjie Xu is a doctoral researcher at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester working on organisational behaviour and human resource management. You can reach her at mengjie.xu-3@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
Image: maddybris under a free licence on Pixabay