What can a South African orange teach us about the entanglement of just transitions?

I recently returned home to the UK from two weeks in South Africa. When I got back, I posted a bunch of photographs to a group chat back in the States.

The photographs were a mixture of everything we had been doing – from enjoying local wineries and going on a game drive to visiting museums and hiking along the Western Cape.

The focus of the visit, however, was work: I had been working with colleagues at Nelson Mandela University and the University of Cape Town on a variety of topics, from AI and complexity to environmental health, urban sustainability, and just transitions. Some of that work took us into parts of Gqeberha and Cape Town where poverty and inequality are very real. But we also saw people and organisations doing remarkable things in response. At MasifundeLearner Development in Walmer Township, for example, we visited their Montessori pre-school, Changemaker Academy and kasiConomy hub, an incubator supporting young entrepreneurs. 

So my group chat started asking questions and we got talking about South Africa.

At some point, one of the group, who lives in Ohio (USA), looked at the orange he was eating and realised it had come from South Africa.

That was a bit of a lightbulb moment.

Here we were talking about South Africa, looking at photographs and discussing what I had been doing, and suddenly the country wasn't quite so far away. There was a South African orange sitting in his hand.

I thought that was a win.

So I added that the blueberries I was eating back in the UK were also from South Africa.

An orange in Ohio. Blueberries in Britain. Both from South Africa.

Another in the group chat – who lives along the northwest coast of the States – was immediately critical: ‘That orange has a serious carbon footprint!’

My family member eating the orange pushed back: ‘Relative to what? Oranges from other places in the States or from the world, all being hawked at various times during the annual commercial distribution period in Ohio.’

I liked the word 'hawked.'

There is something important buried in that little group chat exchange.

The South African orange had suddenly become environmentally suspect because one member of the group chat criticised how far it had travelled.

But oranges don't grow commercially in much of the United States, including the Pacific Northwest, where that person lives. US commercial citrus production is overwhelmingly concentrated in California, Florida, Texas and Arizona. So, all the oranges available to him have travelled a distance, one way or another.

This is not to say that distance does not matter. But distance alone doesn't tell us the environmental impact of food. How something is grown, refrigerated, packed, transported and stored matters too!!

But my concern went beyond the carbon accounting.

We had just spent all this time talking about South Africa. About universities and townships. Poverty and inequality. Businesses and employment. Education and community organisations. Vineyards and restaurants. Cities and coastlines. And, most importantly, about people.

One person in the group chat had suddenly looked at an orange and seen his connection to all of that.

Then, almost immediately, the other person reduced the orange to its carbon footprint.

The carbon matters. Of course it does.

But where had the South Africa gone?

Rethinking Just Transitions

 

I think this little exchange captures something I have been struggling with in my work on just transitions.

We tend to see just transitions through the particular part of the world we know and the particular problems we have learned to see. Sometimes we become so confident that we are making the environmentally ethical choice that we don't notice how narrow our view of the system has become.

South Africa -> long distance -> carbon emissions -> environmental harm

That is real.

But distance is not the whole story.

An orange’s environmental impact is built across the whole supply chain. It depends on how much water and energy are used to grow it, what chemicals are applied, how it is packed, how long it is refrigerated or stored, and whether it travels by ship, truck or air. The environmental cost comes from all of those things together, not from transport alone. You cannot infer the environmental impact of an orange simply from how far it has travelled.

And then there are the people behind that orange. The same orange held in the hand by a person in Ohio is entangled within a global network of agriculture, workers, household incomes, communities, international trade, land, water, inequality, economic security, and Western consumption demands. In South Africa, citrus is not some marginal part of its economy. According to South Africa's Department of Agriculture, the country exported 2.9 million tons of citrus in 2025, overtaking Spain to become the world's largest citrus exporter by volume that year. (For more, CLICK HERE).

Those numbers represent real people and real economic wellbeing: people picking fruit, sorting and packing it, maintaining farms and equipment, and moving produce through ports. Those jobs mean wages flowing into households and communities. What happens to an export industry of this scale reaches far beyond the balance sheet of a citrus company.

But we shouldn't romanticise that either.

Jobs do not automatically equal justice. Like much large-scale commercial agriculture, the citrus industry depends heavily on seasonal labour and is shaped by mechanisation, insecure employment and unequal bargaining power. Creating jobs does not mean workers necessarily receive a fair share of the value they create.

So ‘Citrus creates jobs, therefore buy South African oranges’ is not a satisfactory answer. But neither is ‘That orange travelled a long way, therefore don't buy it.’

It is not an ‘either/or’ situation. It is ‘both/and’ – and this is my main point: the orange is simultaneously part of an environmental system, an employment system, a food system, a trade system and a development system. Pull on one part of that system and something else moves. If a consumer in a wealthy country decides not to buy the South African orange because of its carbon footprint, that decision does not end at the supermarket checkout. Multiply that decision thousands or millions of times and its effects travel backwards through the supply chain – through retailers, importers, shipping companies, ports, packhouses and farms – eventually reaching workers and communities whose livelihoods have become tied to that export economy.

So what is the answer, then?

This is where I find backcasting particularly useful.

 

Backcasting Just Transitions

 

Most of the time, the questions we ask around environmental impact are framed within the system we already have: should someone in the States buy the South African orange or not? That turns a complex transition into a binary consumer choice: buy the orange and accept its environmental impacts, or don't buy it and accept whatever social and economic consequences may follow.

Backcasting starts somewhere else. Instead of asking which choice to make within the present system, it asks us to imagine the future we actually want and then work backwards to ask what would have to change to get there.

In the case of the South African orange, for example, we might ask: how can we create a global supply chain for citrus that is environmentally sustainable, economically viable and more equitable?

That question gives us a picture of the future we want: one in which South African citrus continues to provide employment, export income and economic opportunities for the communities that depend upon it, while the environmental impacts of producing and moving that citrus around the world are substantially reduced.

Then we work backwards.

Working backwards from that future means asking what would have to change across the whole system to make it possible. How could irrigation in South Africa become less water-intensive, and who should pay for the infrastructure needed to make that happen? What investment would help growers reduce fertiliser and pesticide use or move packhouses towards cleaner energy?

But what would also need to change further along the chain? Could shipping, refrigeration and port logistics become less carbon intensive? Could supermarkets in the United States, Britain and Europe change how they source, price and promote imported fruit? Could trade and purchasing arrangements reward lower-impact production and better working conditions rather than simply cheaper fruit? And how might consumers, retailers and governments in importing countries share some of the costs of making that transition possible? These are the kinds of changes across production, trade, infrastructure, consumption and public policy that working backwards from the future brings into view.

Seen from this perspective, the environmental impact of that orange is not simply a South African problem. It is produced through a global system. Countries already struggling with poverty and inequality cannot be expected to bear the costs of transforming that system alone, nor should transition come at the expense of the people whose livelihoods currently depend upon it.

The challenge is to change the relationships themselves. Carbon, employment, water, land, chemicals, shipping, trade, consumption and inequality are all part of the same entanglement. The orange may be South African, but the system that produces, ships, sells and consumes it is global. The transition therefore has to be global too.

One person in my group chat looked at an orange and suddenly saw a global connection.

The other looked at the same orange and saw carbon.

Both saw something real.

But one strand of a tangle is not the entire entanglement.

The problem isn't the orange.

The problem is how all of these things have become entangled in ways that cannot be addressed through a simple choice to buy or not buy. They require us to rethink the entanglement itself.

The challenge of a just transition is to see our entanglements in more complex and sophisticated ways, so that as we seek to un(re)tangle them, we reduce environmental harm without reproducing social and economic injustice.