By: Manav Khanna**
COP30 did something few expected. Even in a moment when global cooperation is strained, Parties to the Paris Agreement managed to agree on something genuinely constructive: establishing a Just Transition Mechanism (JTM) under the Just Transition Work Programme. Indeed, many left Belem wishing for fossil fuel phase-out language and an affirmation of the 1.5°C temperature goal. But given where Parties were coming into Belém, breakthroughs were always going to be difficult.
Yet the COP demonstrated something important: it is possible to introduce innovation – through plurilateral cooperation, coalitions of the willing, and side deals – without weakening the centrality of the UNFCCC’s multilateral process. And within this delicate balance, countries delivered something meaningful: an agreement to develop a Just Transition Mechanism (JTM) under the Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP).
This is a significant step and one that, if shaped well, could offer real benefits to the African continent. It also signals an overdue shift: recognising that just transitions are not a by-product of ambitious climate action; they are enablers of it.
Africa is entering a period where climate ambition, industrial strategy, and energy transitions are converging, making this mechanism especially relevant to the achievement of the continent’s priorities.
How We Got Here: A Journey of Clarifying Expectations
The mechanism has its genesis at COP29, when many developing countries made explicit what had been long implied: the JTWP’s two existing modalities – the dialogues and the high-level Ministerials – were not enough. They were useful, but insufficient to drive the scale of support, cooperation, and guidance needed for whole-of-economy, whole-of-society just transitions.
By the mid-year climate talks, SB62 in Bonn, proposals from across the world emerged in the form of workplans, toolkits, platforms, and guidance frameworks. Once compared, it became clear that most proposals sought to address underlying challenges. The conversation shifted toward their commonalities: shared objectives, core functions, and essential features. This shift also reflects a maturity in the JTWP discussions, moving beyond conceptual debates toward more practical, system-wide solutions.
Clarifying the functions – guidance, coordination, knowledge curation, brokering partnerships, and facilitating support – moved the debate away from tools and toward what was genuinely needed to integrate fairness and equity across the UNFCCC. Once functions and features were clearer, identifying the right institutional arrangement became easier. Form follows function, not the reverse.
Civil society added momentum by strongly supporting the idea of a more action-oriented mechanism named Belém Action Mechanism (BAM). The name didn’t survive intact, but the political energy behind it helped land the idea of a mechanism.
By COP30, many developing countries had aligned behind an approach that was action-oriented, realistic, and grounded in function. Some developed countries raised concerns about resources, duplication of institutions, or the risk that this might become a funding vehicle. But ultimately, Parties agreed that a mechanism was needed, and it could add value without duplicating what already exists.
What Will the Mechanism Do?
The JTM is intended to play a facilitative and enabling role. Its purpose is to support cooperation, coordination, and the integration of fairness and equity across climate action. The decision says the mechanism will enhance international cooperation, technical assistance, capacity-building, and knowledge-sharing, and enable equitable, inclusive just transitions.
This could include work across broad functions:
- Knowledge – gathering, curating, organising, and translating knowledge; identifying gaps; and making guidance usable.
- Coordination – internally across the UNFCCC’s bodies and processes, and externally where it adds value.
- Guidance – helping Parties operationalise fairness and equity across climate finance (including the provision of finance from developed countries under Article 9.1 and achieving a new collective quantified goal on climate finance), the Global Stocktake, mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage.
- Implementation Support – strengthening capacity, promoting cooperation, and brokering partnerships to support whole-of-economy transitions.
These functions are particularly important for countries that face capacity constraints or must balance climate ambition with urgent development needs.
These are precisely the areas the current JTWP modalities cannot deliver on their own.
Addressing the ‘Duplication’ Concern
Some developed countries raised understandable concerns about duplication in an already crowded and fragmented landscape. But the core issue is making the mechanism appropriate, efficient, and complementary, filling the genuine gaps that currently hinder implementation.
This means leveraging existing arrangements where they already perform the needed functions, adjusting or augmenting structures where they fall short, and creating new arrangements only where genuine gaps exist – either within the mechanism or elsewhere in the UNFCCC.
Avoiding duplication does not mean avoiding action. It means designing something that is fit for purpose, reflecting a wider acknowledgment that just transitions are essential to delivering the Paris Agreement’s goals, yet current efforts fall short.
While avoiding duplication is important, the more fundamental point is that more is needed. The mechanism is a response to that need, not an unnecessary new layer.
Why This Matters for Africa
For Africa, the heart of the just transition is a move towards equitable and universal access to energy, economic opportunities, adaptation and resilience, and the developmental upside of the global shift to low-carbon systems. Yet many developed countries still resisted the inclusion of references to “equitable access to the transition’s economic opportunities,” during the negotiations, arguing it lay outside the JTWP’s scope. But from an African perspective, transitioning away from fossil fuels without transitioning into viable economic alternatives is simply not feasible.
This is where the mechanism offers real potential, it could become a home within the UNFCCC to connect the “transition out” with the “transition in”, link global decarbonisation with African diversification needs, support cooperation around critical mineral value-chain upgrading, and create a space to explore mutual-benefit framing – expanding the pie rather than fighting over slices.
Critical minerals illustrate this well. African countries argued strongly for including this in the JTWP decision, drawing on rich discussions at the fourth dialogue on energy transitions. The language didn’t survive, but the issue is not going away – and the JTM offers a natural institutional anchor for it.
Africa is also entering a period of heightened visibility in global climate discussions, especially with an upcoming COP32 to be hosted in Ethiopia. This creates an important opportunity for the continent to demonstrate what just transition implementation looks like in practice, and how development, resilience, and climate ambition can reinforce one another. This moment also provides space for African countries to articulate what meaningful international cooperation on just transitions should look like under the Paris Agreement’s next phase
Similarly, momentum elsewhere – particularly the G20’s new Critical Minerals Framework – also creates opportunities. With more time and a better-structured space, Parties could find shared ground on responsible extraction, managing social and environmental risks, and enabling value-addition in producing countries. This is where the mechanism could be transformative.
The Necessity of the JTM
The decision reflects a growing recognition that just transitions are central to ambitious climate action. Without fairness and equity, mitigation ambition weakens, finance becomes contentious, cooperation breaks down, and political feasibility collapses.
Today, global efforts on just transitions remain fragmented and often disconnected from political, economic, and social realities countries face on the ground. The new mechanism can help bring coherence, strengthen national capacity, provide clearer implementation guidance, and broker the partnerships needed to translate high-level commitments into practice.
If Africa uses this space strategically – particularly to demonstrate that equitable access to transition opportunities is essential to achieving the Paris Agreement’s goals – the JTM could become a valuable lever for more ambitious, fairer and cooperative global action.
At a time when geopolitics are making cooperation increasingly difficult, the establishment of the JTM is a rare positive signal. Now the real work begins: shaping the mechanism, making it fit for purpose, ensuring it complements what exists, and using it to drive tangible development gains for the continent.
**Manav Khanna is the Just Transition Programme Manager at Southern Transitions, a climate and transition think and do tank.
