Toni Beukes
The global energy transition is creating new relationships of interdependence between countries, but what should that interdependence require of us beyond the production and trade of clean energy? For Namibia, green hydrogen provides a particularly relevant lens through which to ask that question. In my last article, I explored the idea of the development deficit and argued that while the destination may be shared, the journey to net zero, and the resources required to complete it, are not.
This article takes that argument one step further: if our destinations are increasingly interconnected, then surely responsibility for getting there must be shared too.
Europe needs clean energy and green molecules to decarbonise its economy, while countries like Namibia need investment, offtake markets and technology to industrialise sustainably. I’ve been thinking about what this interdependence requires of us in the context of three compacts or put more simply, three agreements.
A compact brings countries together around common objectives and, importantly, a shared responsibility for achieving them.
The first is the climate compact. When countries came together in Paris in 2015 and adopted the Paris Agreement, we effectively agreed on a shared destination: to confront climate change collectively, substantially reduce emissions and pursue a pathway towards net zero by 2050. Countries such as Namibia made that commitment too, despite having contributed a fraction of the historical emissions that created the global climate crisis.
That is an important feature of the climate compact: we accepted a shared responsibility for reaching a common destination even though our responsibility for creating the problem was vastly different.
The second is what I would call an emerging commercial compact. We’ve recognised that agreeing on the climate destination does not automatically create the economics required to get us there. Hyphen is a case in point. Developing a green hydrogen project at this scale requires enormous upfront capital and long-term certainty. We need bankable demand for the green ammonia we intend to produce, while prospective buyers must contend with green ammonia that, at least initially, may cost more than grey ammonia. Producing and importing nations have therefore begun developing mechanisms to bridge this commercial gap.
There is precedent for this. Wind and solar faced a similar challenge in their earlier development when costs were higher, markets were less mature and public policy and support helped create the conditions for investment and scale. Green hydrogen presents different challenges, but the underlying principle is similar i.e. achieving a shared objective may require both sides to carry some of the risk and cost needed to make it possible.
H2Global’s double-auction model is one example, using public funding to bridge the price gap between producers and buyers. Contracts for Difference (CfDs) similarly share some of the commercial risk required to enable the transition. Namibia’s Sixth National Development Plan (NDP6) expressly envisages a CfD mechanism to support the green hydrogen industry.
But there is another part of the transition that neither of these compacts necessarily addresses; and that is development. We know that getting the climate ambition right and making the commercial model work does not mean that development will naturally follow.
A commercially successful energy transition can still leave deeper industrial, institutional and human capability gaps largely unchanged. And this is where I believe a third compact is missing: a development compact.
Namibia’s development deficit is rooted, in part, in the legacy of colonialism and apartheid and the profound inequalities they left behind, while our own choices, successes and shortcomings in the decades since independence have also shaped where we find ourselves today. But the allocation of responsibility for that history is not really the point. And there is a parallel here. Just as the climate compact accepts different historical responsibilities, and the commercial compact recognises the need to share risk and cost, a development compact must recognise our unequal starting points and the need to confront them together.
It therefore follows that, if the green hydrogen transition is genuinely to be just for Namibia, we cannot acknowledge those unequal starting points while leaving Namibia to bridge the resulting development deficit largely on its own. Yes, our development remains first and foremost our responsibility, but within these new and increasingly interdependent energy partnerships, closing that development deficit must also become part of the shared responsibility of the governments involved in achieving a just transition.
NDP6 makes clear that Namibia’s ambition for green hydrogen extends well beyond the production and export of green molecules. It forms part of a wider national objective of economic diversification, structural transformation and moving from the export of raw materials towards higher-value production and beneficiation. This reflects a clear policy stance that we must capture more of the value from our natural resources at home. Namibia reinforced that direction in 2023 when Cabinet restricted the export of certain unprocessed critical minerals to encourage local beneficiation.
Importantly, this ambition is also reflected in the 2022 EU-Namibia Strategic Partnership on Sustainable Raw Materials Value Chains and Renewable Hydrogen, which recognises local beneficiation, value addition and the development of domestic value chains as part of the partnership itself.
These are important foundations, but achieving the wider development ambition will depend on whether we can progressively strengthen the industrial, human and institutional capabilities that underpin them.
The question, then, is not simply whether green hydrogen succeeds as an industry, but whether the partnerships being built around it also help Namibia develop the capabilities required to participate more fully in the economic opportunity it creates.
This is not an entirely new proposition. A growing body of policy and academic thinking is asking how the green transition can support African industrialisation instead of reproducing the older patterns in which resources are exported and the value created elsewhere.
Encouragingly, that thinking is also beginning to find expression in practice: The 2022 EU-Namibia Strategic Partnership already encompasses local value addition, infrastructure, skills, research and institutional capacity-building, while Namibia’s green hydrogen cooperation with Germany, through the 2021 Joint Communiqué of Intent and the subsequent 2022 Joint Declaration of Intent, similarly extends beyond hydrogen production to research, skills, technology transfer and the strengthening of technical and regulatory capacity.
These are important building blocks, but the development deficit is systemic and cannot be overcome by individual projects or a collection of isolated interventions. A development compact would therefore take the next step: connecting these building blocks within a deliberate, long-term development trajectory and shifting the focus from supporting development activities to jointly pursuing development outcomes. If Namibia and its sovereign partners can agree, as we already have with the EU and Germany, on cooperation spanning green hydrogen, local value addition, skills, research and institutional capacity, my proposition is that we should go one step further and agree the development outcomes those interventions are collectively intended to achieve, and share responsibility for achieving them.
The question then becomes not simply what programmes did we fund, but how far did they move Namibia along its development trajectory? Under a development compact, closing the development deficit becomes a shared responsibility, with agreed development outcomes forming part of what the sovereign energy partnership itself is expected to deliver.
Singapore offers a useful illustration. Faced in the early 1960s with interconnected constraints across employment, human capital, infrastructure and industrial capacity, its development response deliberately connected industrialisation and investment with education, infrastructure and capable institutions. Namibia’s circumstances are very different, but the lesson is relevant: systemic development challenges are unlikely to be overcome through isolated interventions.
A development compact would apply that principle to the new generation of sovereign energy partnerships.
It would not make our partners responsible for Namibia’s development but would ask us to agree where these partnerships should contribute to our longer-term development trajectory, connect interventions around those outcomes, and measure whether we are getting there. What that architecture looks like in practice still needs to be worked out, and I do not pretend to have the answer. The principle is more important than the precise mechanism, and that is that development becomes part of how we define and measure the success of future energy partnerships itself.
The establishment in June 2026 of the new South-North Commission on Development at the Hamburg Sustainability Conference therefore comes at an important moment. Its mandate is expressly concerned with developing new forms of strategic partnership between the Global North and South and contributing concrete proposals to the post-2030 development debate. I would offer the development compact as one proposition for the Commission to consider, interrogate and, importantly, help us figure out how to implement. I have framed this argument through green hydrogen because it is the transition opportunity most immediately before us in Namibia, but the principle is broader. Whether future partnerships are built around energy, critical minerals or other emerging industrial value chains, the same question arises: if our economic futures are becoming increasingly interconnected, how do we ensure that the development required to participate meaningfully in that future becomes part of what we build together and, in doing so, part of what makes the energy transition genuinely just? Because ultimately, a just transition should not only change how the world produces and consumes energy; it should also change the development trajectory of the countries helping to make that transition possible.
Toni Beukes Head of ESG & Corporate Affairs, Hyphen Hydrogen Energy October 2026
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