Summary
- The Southern African Development Community (SADC) is strategically positioned to leverage the ongoing global energy transition, attract foreign direct investment, and alleviate the challenges of a lack of access and inequality, which impede development.
- However, African countries are faced with a dilemma: how to advance their own economic transformation and industrialisation efforts while responding to the global call for climate action.
- While green economies are often touted as the solution to the inherent tension between heightened industrialisation and the need for responsible climate action, SADC can no longer afford to ‘cut and paste’ externally derived, green industrialisation policies and practices. ‘Old wine in new wineskins’ will no longer suffice. A new and more provocative paradigm is needed.
- It is of paramount importance to rethink our deeply entrenched mental models, worldviews, myths and metaphors, which includes asking how we got here and how we can find a new and better path by changing our thinking, beliefs and prevailing structures.
- Regenerative principles and approaches, which draw on historically rich, African indigenous knowledge systems, can be used to forge an alternative paradigm that views the world’s problems in a different light and seeks new and innovative solutions.
