Abstract
This thesis explores the role of finance in sustainability transitions, using South Africa’s energy
transition to green hydrogen as an instrumental case. The research responds to growing calls
for radical transformation in finance to address the systemic, structural, and persistent financing
challenges facing developing countries. These challenges reflect deeply embedded historical
power structures which continue to marginalise and subordinate developing countries in global
financial markets and institutions. Critically, they undermine efforts to invest in sustainable
technologies that can address climate change, support sustainable economic development, and
address historical injustices and inequalities.
The central proposition of this thesis is that sustained scholarly engagement is needed to deepen
our understanding of finance, clarify its structuring role, and identify pathways to its radical
transformation. A second proposition is that the sustainability transitions literature provides a
useful theoretical point of departure for such engagement, given its focus on transformation as
structural change. However, finance remains a relatively underexplored dimension within this
literature. This thesis builds on this nascent scholarship to address the research question: What
is the role of finance in sustainability transitions, and how can finance be transformed to
support sustainable, just societal outcomes in the Global South?
The research is designed as an instrumental case study, underpinned by a critical realist
philosophy of science. The four papers that constitute this thesis draw on primary and
secondary data to conceptualise, analyse, and theorise the role of finance in sustainability
transitions from a developing country perspective. The first paper provides the empirical
context for green hydrogen development and asks how finance shapes technology development
to influence system directionality, and what the implications are for a just transition. The
second paper begins with the premise that transforming finance requires the transformation of
financing structures. It identifies specific financing rules and rule domains and explores how
these structures shape the financing dynamics of South Africa’s energy system. The third paper
examines how these financing structures interact with niches (in this case, green hydrogen) to
influence system directionality, and the final paper explores the capacity of the state, through
policy, to reconfigure financing structures. Collectively, the papers advance knowledge of
finance and how it can be transformed to support sustainable transition journeys.
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This thesis, as a body of work, has developed several empirical, methodological, analytical,
and theoretical contributions. It offers new concepts, frameworks, and methods to study
finance, and develops causal explanations that explain its impacts and outcomes in the South
African context. Through synthesis, including the use of speculative science fiction, it advances
critical insights and propositions on the nature and structuring role of finance, and identifies
finance theories with explanatory power that could form the basis for future research. These
include the proposition that finance functions as an archetypal regime: coherent, expansionary,
and resistant to change across space and time. It exerts power over natural resources, people,
and future income streams, presents as unbounded and infinitely expansive, whilst
simultaneously constrained by the material limits of what it can exert power over. Justice in a
Global South context demands the redistribution of this power, requiring experimental policy
interventions to fundamentally reimagine finance and its governance structures. In a world
where finite resources and power are distributed more equitably, innovation emerges as the
primary mechanism to achieve and sustain social progress.