Innovative governance for transformative energy policy in sub-Saharan Africa after COVID-19: Green pathways in Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa.

Learning from innovations that fail is imperative for innovations that succeed. The theoretical underpinnings for this innovative framing are reflexivity, transformative unlearning, and intelligent failure. This framework proposes a definition of "transformative governance" as governance that creates structural equities. Governments rebuilding their economies after the COVID-19 pandemic seek equitable green transformations; that are gendered, structural, and sustainable, learning from the implemented gender-sensitive responses (hereafter referred to as policy innovations) This paper argues that transformative practices, beliefs, values, assumptions, policies, and systematic learnings are complementary to post-crisis transformations. The aim is to promote systematic learnings from innovation governance failure regarding energy policy through the analysis of COVID-19 practices and the unlearning of policy innovation beliefs, values, and assumptions that are not transformative. I ask: how gender-equitable, structurally equitable, and green-transformative were the COVID-19 policy innovations? The study's approach is qualitative and situated within the constructivist research paradigm. It uses reflexive thematic analysis combined with innovative coded policy narrative and a transformative index-matching technique, to identify the gap within transformative interventions. The study included 58 policy innovations ( = 58) collected from the UNDP, KPMG, government reports, and news flashes from the three most populous nations in sub-Sahara Africa: Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa. The study found that policy innovations were inequitable in terms of gender, structure, and sustainability whereas the derived transformative pathways are equitable and gender-transformative, structurally transformative, and green-transformative. The rationales behind a transformative approach to policy reflect the systemic failures across key areas: market dynamics, research and development, and green transformation. Policy innovators can align transformative pathways for innovative governance that implements transformative energy policy. To address the needs of multiple fragile and vulnerable identities, the derived post-pandemic framework is an intersectional plan with 10 policy learning pillars. The plan includes local energy transformation and reinforcement of energy justice components, such as the localization of the energy industry, community power, and social norms, including which translates to "I am because we are." Reengagement in global supply chains requires South-South trade relations to be restrategized.