JustRE: The Global South Alliance for a Just Transition to Renewable Energy

As utility-scale renewable energy expands across the Global South, communities are increasingly affected by decisions about land, water, livelihoods, and local development. Ensuring that these projects are developed responsibly — with meaningful participation, authority, and benefits for communities — is one of the defining challenges of the energy transition. 

Forum for the Future is a founding partner of the JustRE Alliance, a global network working to ensure the transition to renewable energy is socially responsible, community-centred, and equitable. 

Together, we are building knowledge, amplifying Global South voices, and developing practical tools to help shape a renewable energy transition that works for both people and planet.  

One of the JustRE Alliance's core workstreams explores what meaningful community ownership looks like in utility-scale renewable energy projects across the Global South. 

Through a global review of ownership models, engagement with practitioners and experts, and collaboration across the Alliance network, we examined how communities participate in and influence renewable energy projects throughout their lifecycle. 

This work emerged from a simple challenge: while community ownership is increasingly discussed, there is little shared language for understanding the different ways communities in the Global South exercise meaningful decision-making authority.  

Our goal is to help communities, developers, investors, policymakers, and practitioners better understand, assess, and design renewable energy projects that enable meaningful community authority. 

The taxonomy provides a framework for understanding community authority in renewable energy projects. This anthology brings that framework to life. Drawing on seven utility-scale renewable energy projects across the Global South from Kenya, Argentina, Colombia and South Africa , the case studies map how community authority can be exercised across different stages of the project lifecycle from consultation and co-decision to long-term community ownership and leadership. 

Together, the cases illustrate how governance arrangements, benefit-sharing mechanisms, land stewardship, and decision-making authority vary by contexts, while highlighting the opportunities, tensions, and trade-offs involved in sharing power throughout renewable energy development.

Explore the case studies to see how different models align with the taxonomy and what they reveal about community ownership in practice. 

Spotlight: Case Story 

Kipeto Wind Farm, Kenya

Read the story here 

This work is a beginning. We see these tools and resources as foundations for deeper collaboration, testing, and learning across the Global South. Our goal is to work in concert with stakeholders across the renewable energy transition to explore how community authority can be strengthened in practice. 

Through partnerships, workshops and knowledge-sharing, we aim to support the growth of a stronger ecosystem for socially responsible renewable energy development. 

The renewable energy transition is already underway. The question is not whether it will happen, but how it happens and who has the opportunity to shape it. 

Powerful Futures: Practitioner Insights on the Just Transition to Renewable Energy 

Powerful Futures shares lessons and experiences from practitioners working to ensure utility-scale renewable energy deployment is equitable and community-centred across the Global South. Drawing on real-world initiatives, the publication explores practical approaches to community engagement, benefit-sharing, responsible land and water management, and supply chain stewardship.

Learn about the book

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