(Illustration by Maria Carluccio)
In May 2025, the European Commission and German state-owned investment banks KfW and DEG signed a €300 million ($355 million) guarantee agreement to support green hydrogen development across the Middle East and North Africa. The announcement employed all the right language of just transition: Sustainable urban development. Innovative energy solutions. Climate-change mitigation. Quality of life improvements. But it avoided mentioning who would be making decisions about these transformations.
This is the paradox at the heart of Europe’s green hydrogen diplomacy. The policy frameworks speak repeatedly of partnership, mutual benefit, and just transition, but the structures that govern such policies tell a different story. Across Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond, the mechanisms that design, finance, and implement green hydrogen projects systematically exclude the civil society actors who should be central to any just transition. The result is a new form of energy relationship that reproduces old patterns of extraction in the clothing of sustainability.
The numbers reveal the scale of what is underway. The European Union aims to import 10 million tons of renewable hydrogen by 2030. Of announced renewable-energy projects in the Middle East and North Africa, 14 percent are designated for hydrogen production, with European institutions positioning the region as a primary import source. (By comparison, only 2 percent of such projects worldwide are for hydrogen.) Morocco has committed 1 million hectares of land to green hydrogen development. Tunisia, one of the most water-scarce countries in the world, plans to use 248 million cubic meters of desalinated water annually by 2050 for hydrogen production. These are not pilot programs. They represent a fundamental restructuring of energy relationships across the Mediterranean.
The question is not whether green hydrogen has a role in decarbonization. It does. The question is whose decarbonization, and at what cost to whom. When Tunisia faces a 50 percent energy deficit yet directs new renewable capacity toward export rather than domestic consumption, something has gone wrong in the transition calculus. When Morocco’s civil society organizations report that mega-projects are planned with no input from local populations while taking enormous areas of land out of use for local residents, “just” transition becomes unjust.
Extraction Across North Africa
I study governance systems. My current research examines ocean governance, including energy transitions and maritime sovereignty, in Africa and the Middle East, looking specifically at how these partnerships are structured and who gets excluded from their design. What I find, consistently, is a governance architecture that treats civil society as a problem to be managed rather than a partner to be engaged.
Consider Morocco. The country has positioned itself as a regional leader in renewable energy, and European development banks have poured hundreds of millions of euros into solar and wind infrastructure. KfW alone invested €830 million($981 million) into the Noor solar-power plant. Yet Moroccan civil society organizations have documented how this model concentrates power among a handful of semipublic actors while blocking private businesses, communities, and households from meaningful participation. The electricity market remains a centralized virtual monopoly. Surplus energy from small producers cannot be fed into the grid. Local knowledge about land use, water management, and community needs goes ignored in favor of technical frameworks developed elsewhere.
The water dimension makes this particularly acute. Morocco, a country facing severe water stress, plans to use green hydrogen production, and the electrolysis process to create it demands enormous quantities of water. A letter published in Science in late 2024 warned that Morocco’s plan to dedicate 1 million hectares to green hydrogen will benefit Europe at the expense of local environments and communities. The authors urged the country to explore renewable energy that benefits the local power grid instead of perpetuating its role as a resource exporter.
The extractive pattern repeats across the region. In Tunisia, the national hydrogen strategy was developed with support from German state development agency GIZ following a memorandum signed in December 2020. Its implementation has prompted opposition from local social movements, including the Stop Pollution Movement and the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights. Their critique is straightforward: The planned hydrogen valley in southern Tunisia sits on communal land belonging to tribes and locals who use it for pastoralism and small-scale farming. The strategy calls for 500,000 hectares of land, twice the area of Greater Tunis. No governance mechanism exists to incorporate their voices into decisions that will reshape their lives. The hydrogen-strategy document does not address how this land will be acquired, raising immediate concerns about displacement.
Absurdly, even though Tunisia imports much of its food, the plan would use its land and water for hydrogen production to serve another country’s energy needs. Tunisia faces a 50 percent energy deficit—it cannot meet its own electricity demand. Rather than prioritizing investments to close this gap, the government plans to channel new renewable capacity toward export
Egypt suffers similar dynamics. The country has signed multiple green hydrogen agreements with European partners, with frameworks that include technical training for Egyptian workers, regulatory alignment, and infrastructure investment. But these frameworks lack any robust mechanism for civil society participation in project design or benefit distribution. A March 2025 report from Greenpeace MENA and the MENA Fem Movement for Economic, Development, and Ecological Justice found that European energy investments in Egypt and Morocco perpetuate resource extraction to Europe while contributing little to local economies. The study specifically identified green hydrogen as replicating colonial patterns under the banner of climate solutions.
International development philanthropy and civil society organizations face a critical choice. The green transition is coming to the Global South whether local actors are involved or not. European energy security demands it. Climate targets require it. The infrastructure is already being built. The question is whether civil society will be partners in shaping these transformations or the transition will happen to communities rather than with them.
The current trajectory is not encouraging. A Carnegie Endowment for International Peace analysis of Morocco found that climate-friendly energy projects have often failed to reach their full potential because of mismanagement and poor interagency coordination. No tool or agency exists to monitor climate-related programs or spending. Local officials learn of climate initiatives not through official channels but by seeing project implementation on the ground.
A Test of the Development Sector
What would genuine inclusion look like? Governance structures would give affected communities decision-making power over land use, water allocation, and benefit distribution. Transparency requirements would make international funding conditions publicly accessible. Independent civil society organizations would be able to monitor implementation and advocate for local interests. Projects would incorporate traditional knowledge and local practices as valuable inputs rather than rejecting them as obstacles to efficiency.
The Carnegie report highlights how Moroccan scientists, activists, and farmers are calling for a more inclusive, bottom-up strategy that directly empowers rural communities in climate adaptation. This framework would treat vulnerable peoples as partners and agents rather than victims and subjects. Their local knowledge and traditional practices would serve as essential components of government policies rather than inconveniences to be overcome.
The philanthropic sector has a particular responsibility here. International development funding shapes what kinds of projects get built and how they are governed. Foundations and development finance institutions can choose to require meaningful civil society engagement as a condition of support. They can fund independent monitoring capacity. They can support the legal and organizational infrastructure that allows local communities to participate as genuine stakeholders rather than passive recipients.
The alternative is a green transition that looks remarkably like the colonial extractive relationships it claims to replace. Europe gets the clean energy it needs for decarbonization targets. North African and Middle Eastern communities get the land degradation, water stress, and economic displacement. The language changes. The underlying dynamics persist
This outcome is not inevitable. Green hydrogen partnerships could be structured differently. Governance frameworks could incorporate civil society voices from the design stage rather than treating consultation as an afterthought. Benefit-sharing mechanisms could ensure that host communities gain from projects sited on their land. Transparency requirements could make clear what conditions are attached to international funding.
But none of this will happen automatically. It requires deliberate choices by the foundations, development banks, and international organizations that shape how green-energy projects are designed and implemented. It requires pressure from civil society organizations in both Europe and the Global South. It requires scholars and practitioners willing to document the gap between transition rhetoric and governance reality.
The green hydrogen economy is being built right now. The question is whether civil society will help shape it or merely live with its consequences. The dynamic offers a test of whether the international development sector can learn from decades of extractive relationships and build something genuinely different. The infrastructure being constructed today will determine energy relationships for generations. The governance frameworks being established now will determine who benefits and who bears the costs.
We know what extractive energy relationships look like. We have seen them operate across the Global South for more than a century. The promise of the green transition was that decarbonization could break these patterns, creating partnerships that serve both climate goals and local development. That promise is not being kept. Whether it can still be salvaged depends on choices being made right now, in boardrooms and ministries and foundation offices, about what kind of transition we are actually willing to build.
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