Project by Projects

I first began writing this piece a while ago, but recently found myself returning to it after submitting an application that required me to think again about the global political economy of energy and climate transition. What struck me was how relevant the questions still felt. They were relevant when I first drafted them, and they feel even more relevant now.

So I am sharing this for colleagues, partners, and actors working across climate, energy, environment, governance, philanthropy, and development. Not as a final word, but as a systems-thinking contribution to a conversation that remains urgent. I am open, of course, to future debate about what holds, what needs more nuance, and what may shift as the world itself continues to move.

But I am certain about one thing: climate policies may have borders, but climate impacts do not. Energy decisions may be made within national, regional, or institutional boundaries, but their effects travel through food systems, water systems, migration patterns, public health, livelihoods, markets, and future generations. If we can agree on that, perhaps we can begin to break through the silos faster, irrespective of where we sit in the global system.

The clearest strategic point is this: the transition will fail if it is treated only as a technology shift. It has to be understood as a governance shift, a finance shift, an industrial-policy shift, a food-and-health shift, and a social contract shift.

The global picture: the transition is accelerating, but unevenly

The world is already moving into what the IEA calls the “Age of Electricity.” Electricity demand is rising much faster than overall energy use, driven by mobility, cooling, advanced manufacturing, data centres, AI, industrial uses, and household demand. The IEA projects electricity demand to rise by around 40% by 2035 under current and stated policy scenarios, and by more than 50% in a net-zero pathway. But the systems needed to support that demand are not keeping pace. Generation investment is moving faster than grids, storage, and flexibility. Annual grid spending is around USD 400 billion, while generation investment is about USD 1 trillion, creating congestion, delays, higher prices, and rising curtailment of renewables.

At the same time, clean energy investment is now larger than fossil fuel investment, but the distribution is deeply unequal. Global energy investment is expected to reach USD 3.3 trillion in 2025, with about USD 2.2 trillion going to renewables, nuclear, grids, storage, low-emissions fuels, efficiency, and electrification, compared with USD 1.1 trillion for oil, gas, and coal. Yet Africa receives only about 2% of global clean energy investment despite having about 20% of the world’s population. That is not just a finance gap; it is a structural exclusion problem.

The emissions picture remains uncomfortable. UNEP’s 2024 Emissions Gap Report says the world needs greenhouse gas cuts of 42% by 2030 and 57% by 2035 to stay on track for 1.5°C. Without stronger ambition and immediate delivery, the world is on course for roughly 2.6–3.1°C of warming this century. That means the central problem is no longer whether solutions exist. Solar, wind, forests, efficiency, electrification, and resilience measures exist. The issue is whether political economy, finance, governance, and trust can move fast enough.

Africa needs energy access, climate resilience, industrial opportunity, and finance that recognizes proximity. The continent’s transition cannot be framed only as emissions reduction because its immediate challenge is still access, reliability, affordability, and resilience. Mission 300, led by the World Bank Group and African Development Bank, aims to connect 300 million people in Africa to electricity by 2030. The World Bank frames electricity access as foundational to jobs, healthcare, education, digital inclusion, food preservation, and resilience to floods and droughts. In Nigeria alone, the DARES project is expected to help over 17 million Nigerians access efficient electricity and replace more than 250,000 polluting and expensive diesel generators.

For Africa, the missing conversation is not simply “renewables versus fossil fuels.” It is: how does energy transition become economic transformation? Who owns the assets? Who builds the systems? Who benefits from the jobs? Who has access to the data? Who verifies that climate investments are real, locally relevant, and not just donor-facing? This is where subnational climate governance, regional power pools, climate-data verification, distributed renewable energy, clean cooking, agriculture, and health all sit in the same system.

Asia needs demand management, coal transition, industrial decarbonization, and grid modernization without breaking development momentum. India, Southeast Asia, and China are central to the future of global energy demand. The IEA notes that emerging economies led by India and Southeast Asia are becoming major drivers of energy market dynamics as China’s earlier dominance in demand growth shifts. Asia’s challenge is not simply to add renewables; it is to manage urbanization, cooling demand, manufacturing growth, coal dependence, grid capacity, and industrial competitiveness at the same time.

The conversation falling through the cracks in Asia is how to decarbonize growth without making energy insecurity politically explosive. Coal is not only an emissions source. It is tied to jobs, state revenues, industrial power, local politics, and energy reliability. A transition plan that does not address those political-economy dependencies will be technically correct and socially fragile.

Europe needs competitiveness, energy security, social trust, and industrial transition. Europe’s post-Ukraine energy reality has made energy security and affordability inseparable from climate policy. The IEA also notes that European clean energy spending accelerated after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the cut to pipeline gas deliveries, but Europe also faces competitiveness concerns, grid bottlenecks, industrial decarbonization pressure, and public backlash around household costs.

The missing conversation in Europe now might be about how to maintain public consent. Citizens do not experience “the transition” as a policy architecture. They experience electricity bills, heating costs, job insecurity, transport costs, and fear that climate policy is something done to them rather than with them.

North America needs to reconcile clean-tech industrial policy with polarization, grid strain, AI demand, and fossil incumbency. The United States is now shaped by a mix of clean-tech incentives, fossil production, rising electricity demand from AI and data centres, permitting bottlenecks, and political polarization. Again, quoting the IEA, data centre investment is expected to reach USD 580 billion in 2025, surpassing global oil supply investment, and that more than 85% of new data centre capacity additions over the next decade are expected in the United States, China, and the European Union.

The neglected question here is: what is AI’s energy bargain with society? If AI has joined the conversation and is driving for electricity demand, water use, land competition, and grid congestion, then the benefits of AI need to be matched against the local costs borne by communities hosting data centres, transmission lines, water withdrawals, and energy infrastructure.

Latin America and the Caribbean need resilience, value addition, forest protection, mineral governance, and protection from extractive transition models. The region has major assets: hydropower, forests, lithium, copper, solar, wind, bioeconomy potential, and urban innovation. But the risk is that the transition reproduces old extraction patterns: minerals leave, value addition happens elsewhere, and local communities carry environmental and social costs.

The missing conversation is not only “how do we unlock investment?” It is: how do countries negotiate value, processing, jobs, Indigenous rights, water protection, biodiversity, and fiscal benefit in the transition economy? Without that, the clean-energy supply chain may become a cleaner label on an old political economy.

The Middle East and North Africa need diversification, water-energy planning, heat resilience, subsidy reform, and a credible fossil-export transition. MENA’s political economy is deeply tied to oil and gas rents, energy subsidies, industrial policy, and social contracts. IMF analysis shows that fossil fuel subsidies are not only fiscal burdens; they also encourage pollution, are poorly targeted to the poor, and often benefit wealthier households more. In 2024, explicit fossil fuel subsidies were estimated at USD 0.73 trillion globally, while implicit subsidies were USD 6.7 trillion.

The strategic conversation here would be politically delicate: how do fossil-exporting states diversify without destabilizing the social contract? How do they reform subsidies while protecting the poor? How do they use today’s fossil revenues to build tomorrow’s post-fossil legitimacy?

Small island states and climate-vulnerable countries need adaptation, loss-and-damage finance, debt relief, resilient infrastructure, and survival-level planning. For Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and highly vulnerable countries, climate transition is not abstract. It is shoreline loss, saltwater intrusion, heat stress, storm damage, rising insurance costs, debt distress, and migration pressure. WHO notes that 3.6 billion people already live in areas highly susceptible to climate change, and that low-income countries and SIDS endure some of the harshest health impacts despite contributing least to emissions.

The missing conversation is whether adaptation is still being treated as secondary. Global climate finance remains heavily weighted toward mitigation. We see in the CPI reports that in 2023, mitigation finance made up USD 1.78 trillion of global climate flows, while adaptation finance reached only USD 65 billion, though likely underestimated.

In the middle of all this, one might wonder – what might the world be missing amidst the gamut of issues we respectively are tacking? It is simply – coordination capacity.

From where I sit, there does not appear to be a deliberate design or architecture of conversations to hold energy access, emissions reduction, climate adaptation, jobs, public health, food systems, industrial strategy, debt, trust, and local realities in the same frame. Too many conversations still happen in separate rooms: energy people talk about megawatts, climate people talk about emissions, finance people talk about bankability, agriculture people talk about yields, health people talk about air pollution and heat, and communities talk about survival. The system then struggles because the lived problem was never actually integrated.

It is also missing trust infrastructure. Climate finance is rising globally, but confidence in where money goes, who benefits, and whether projects are real remains uneven. CPI reports global climate finance hit USD 1.9 trillion in 2023 and likely exceeded USD 2 trillion in 2024, but Emerging Market and Developing Economies (EMDEs) still face a stark affordability-of-capital barrier and need more catalytic capital such as guarantees, grants, and catalytic equity.

This is where I see a real opening for African-led verification, intelligence, and governance architecture. Not more dashboards for the sake of dashboards, but systems that help funders, governments, communities, and investors understand what is real, what is ready, what is risky, what is locally grounded, and what is likely to produce social and economic value.

The world is also missing serious last-mile political economy analysis. We talk about energy transition as infrastructure, but people experience it through bills, food, smoke, transport, health, jobs, and risk. WHO estimates that around 2.1 billion people still cook with polluting fuels and technologies, and household air pollution caused an estimated 2.9 million deaths per year in 2021. Women and children bear much of the health burden and also face time, safety, and productivity costs from collecting fuel.

Based on the learning so far, there are clearly some conversations that might need to be happening. Likely are happening. But are not driving the global discussions currently. 

The first conversation that is falling through the cracks is clean cooking as a core climate, health, gender, and economic issue. It is still too often treated as a household-energy side issue, when it is actually one of the clearest examples of how energy transition touches everyday life. A woman cooking with firewood is not waiting for a global debate about net zero. She is breathing smoke today. A child missing school to gather fuel is living the social cost of failed energy access today.

The second is grids as the backbone of justice. Everyone likes renewable generation. Fewer people want to sit with the boring but decisive issues of transmission, distribution, utilities, transformers, tariffs, local permitting, maintenance, and financial viability. But if grids fail, the transition fails. If utilities are insolvent, projects do not connect. If transmission is weak, renewable energy gets curtailed. If electricity is unreliable, households and businesses keep using diesel.

The third is transition minerals as a governance test. Critical minerals are now the new geopolitical terrain. The IEA notes that one country is the dominant refiner for 19 out of 20 energy-related strategic minerals, with an average market share around 70%, and that more than half of these minerals were subject to some form of export control by November 2025. This is not just a supply-chain concern; it is a question of sovereignty, industrial policy, trade power, and development pathways.

The fourth is AI and energy demand. AI is being discussed as a climate tool, a productivity tool, and a governance tool. But it is also becoming an energy and water demand driver. The political economy question is: who gets the benefits of AI, who pays the infrastructure cost, and whose grid gets strained?

The fifth is subnational climate governance. Many climate commitments are national, but implementation happens in states, provinces, municipalities, utilities, farms, local markets, industrial clusters, and households. If subnational systems are weak, national ambition becomes theatre. This is particularly important in countries like Nigeria, where climate realities vary across ecological zones and state-level policy coherence matters for agriculture, flooding, energy access, public health, and livelihoods.

It would be remis to ignor also that at the center of it all is a tension between climate necessity and political survival. Leaders know the transition is necessary, but they are accountable to citizens who want jobs, food, affordable transport, reliable power, and dignity now. That is why fossil fuel subsidy reform, tariff reform, grid investment, and carbon pricing become politically explosive. IMF analysis notes that subsidy reform often faces public opposition because people do not trust governments to compensate the poor and middle class or use revenues productively.

Around that center are again five interacting systems.

The finance system that rewards bankability, scale, currency stability, and investor confidence. The energy system needing generation, grids, storage, dispatchability, affordability, and reliability. The political system that needs legitimacy, jobs, regional balance, and manageable prices. The social system focused on health, food, safety, livelihoods, and fairness. The ecological system which is already moving: heat, floods, droughts, storms, disease risks, and food insecurity are intensifying.

The current natural flow of things (and the potential danger) is that each system optimizes for itself. Finance optimizes for risk-adjusted return. Energy ministries optimize for supply. Climate ministries optimize for NDCs. Politicians optimize for short-term stability. Communities optimize for survival. But the actual transition requires negotiated alignment across all of them.

A market woman in Nigeria running a freezer on a diesel generator is not thinking about global transition pathways. She is thinking about fuel price, spoiled stock, noise, fumes, and whether her business survives another week. That is energy transition as livelihood security. The World Bank’s Nigeria DARES project explicitly links distributed renewable energy to replacing polluting and expensive diesel generator sets for millions of people.

A rural household cooking with biomass is not waiting for a climate-finance taxonomy. They are breathing particulate matter, losing time to fuel gathering, exposing women and children to health and safety risks, and absorbing a burden that is invisible in many energy models.

A farmer facing erratic rains, heat, or floods is not experiencing climate change as a future scenario. They are experiencing it as lost harvest, higher food prices, debt, migration pressure, and uncertainty about whether children can remain in school. WHO frames climate change as affecting health through food systems, water, livelihoods, disease, displacement, and mental health, with vulnerable groups hit hardest.

A young person in an under-electrified community is not simply “off-grid.” They are excluded from digital work, refrigerated healthcare, safe night study, productive equipment, and many forms of participation in the modern economy. That is why electricity access is not a technical indicator. It is an opportunity architecture.

Naturally as a strategist, one must wonder about how to design these systems. Considering that the most important question now might not only be “how do we transition?” But also what are we trying to make possible through transition? 

If the answer is only “lower emissions,” then it is likely the strategy will be too narrow. A good answer will have to demonstrate an inclusion of reliable energy, healthier homes, climate-resilient agriculture, local jobs, reduced exposure to shocks, better public health, industrial opportunity, social trust, and protection for future generations.

Based on the learnings to date, I posit a few questions and conversations which I think need to be happening now:

How do we design transition around everyday people, not just around national targets? The core test of climate and energy policy should be whether it improves the lived conditions of households, workers, farmers, small businesses, patients, students, and future generations.

How do we treat energy access and climate mitigation as linked, not competing, goals? In Africa especially, transition must expand access while avoiding high-carbon lock-in. That requires distributed renewables, grid investment, regional power pools, clean cooking, utility reform, and productive-use energy.

How do we build trustworthy climate-data and verification systems? This is not a side issue. If finance is to move toward proximity, funders and investors need credible ways to see real context, local validation, implementation risk, social benefit, and climate integrity.

How do we make finance fit the political economy of place? EMDEs need lower cost of capital, guarantees, local-currency financing, grants, catalytic equity, project preparation, and stronger domestic capital markets. Without that, “bankability” becomes a polite word for exclusion.

How do we coordinate across ministries and sectors before crises expose the gaps? Energy transition sits across finance, power, environment, agriculture, health, transport, industry, education, technology, and subnational governance. If coordination is weak, every plan becomes fragmented.

How do we measure success beyond megawatts and dollars mobilized? The metrics must include reliability, affordability, health gains, women’s time saved, post-harvest loss reduced, diesel displaced, jobs created, local ownership, resilience strengthened, and trust built.

The final strategic synthesis

So currently the world appears to need to move from ambition into a clear transition architecture that is politically intelligent, locally grounded, finance-aware, and people-facing.

The most strategic move now then would be to not let the energy transition become a race for technologies, minerals, deals, and geopolitical advantage while everyday people continue to live with dirty cooking, unstable power, heat stress, food insecurity, weak public services, and disaster exposure.

The strategic opportunity is to reframe energy and climate transition as a system for humans to flourish. That means the upstream conversations need to keep asking: what does this mean for the woman cooking in smoke, the farmer losing crops, the small business running on diesel, the child studying without light, the health center without reliable power, the worker displaced from a fossil-dependent sector, and the community asked to host the infrastructure of a global transition?

The world is not short of climate conversations. It is short of the right ones, in the right rooms, with the right evidence, connected to the right people, early enough to change the path.

And for this reason the organizations that I have co-Founded (Project by Projects and FundLink Aid International) there is an intentional focus in helping institutions, funders, and governments translate climate and energy transition from ambition into coordinated, verifiable, locally grounded action. That means strategy, convening, subnational governance, climate-intelligence systems, verification, and the design of conversations that connect global goals to lived realities.

Yop Rwang Pam