Governance of future-making: Green hydrogen in Namibia and South Africa

The green-hydrogen sector has created considerable expectations in the Global South about export-oriented development and industrial path creation. However, whether and how these expectations are really materializing requires further scrutiny. This article develops a conceptual approach that we call governance of future-making. Thereby, we want to understand how actors try to coordinate their expectations about future economic development in different contexts and across scales over time. We conceptualize the emergence of new regional development trajectories as resulting from the use of governance instruments with an increasing bindingness, which reflect the interplay between governance of and by expectations. Based on this approach, we analyze and compare green-hydrogen activities in Namibia and South Africa. We find that future-making is becoming more binding in both countries but has not resulted in path creation yet.