Dataset on Public Discourse Around South Africa’s COP26 Just Energy Transition Deal: News Media and Facebook Comments

<p dir="ltr">This dataset documents public conversations on South Africa’s energy transition policies and initiatives, with a particular focus on the COP26 Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP). It supports research aimed at understanding the social and communicative dynamics involved in transforming South Africa’s energy system—historically dependent on coal—toward cleaner energy sources. Given the intersection of energy infrastructure with socio-economic and political systems, communication studies offer a critical lens for examining how publics frame and contest visions of future energy transitions.</p><p dir="ltr">The dataset extends earlier work exploring how South African publics received and responded to the COP26 coal phase-out deal on Facebook (Okoliko and de Wit, 2024), with the dataset available at: https://doi.org/10.25413/sun.24297940.v1. For this current dataset, additional content from mainstream news media was curated to enable a comparative analysis of platform-specific framings: mainstream news media versus Facebook comments. The analysis intends to examine whether and how justice imaginaries shape discourse on the JETP, drawing on the four pillars of Just Energy Transition (JET): procedural, distributive, recognition, and restorative justice.</p><p dir="ltr">A two-stage sampling approach was employed. First, news items published by South African media discussing the COP26 JETP deal were purposively targeted, regardless of format. Materials were sourced from the LexisNexis database and a previously archived dataset on SUNScholarData (Okoliko and de Wit, 2024). A LexisNexis search was conducted on February 2, 2025, using the terms <i>COP26</i>, <i>$8.5 billion</i>, <i>energy</i>, <i>transition</i>, and <i>South Africa</i>. The search, limited to the period November 1, 2021–January 31, 2022, and filtered for South Africa-based news articles, yielded 402 records. After screening for relevance and removing duplicates, 90 articles directly addressing the JETP deal were retained. Excluded items included articles mentioning climate transitions, COP26, or financing without a specific focus on South Africa’s JETP.</p><p dir="ltr">The Facebook dataset comprises 3,980 comments responding to 31 news posts by South African media outlets (see Okoliko and de Wit, 2024, for methodological details). To supplement the mainstream media dataset, 20 additional news publications shared on Facebook were added. Nine of the 31 records were excluded due to duplication or unavailability, resulting in 110 relevant media items. Facebook comments were further screened for analytical relevance, excluding entries with minimal content (e.g., “that’s true” or “of course”), which reduced the total to 3,668 substantive comments.</p><p dir="ltr">The dataset is structured as follows:</p><ul><li><b>News Media Complete Dataset</b> (screened LexisNexis-sourced records)</li><li><b>News Media Subsets Analysed:</b></li><li><ul><li>News Media subset</li><li>Subset of full Facebook post texts shared by media outlets</li></ul></li><li><b>Facebook Data Subset Analysed</b> (see Okoliko, 2025, for the complete dataset).</li></ul><p dir="ltr">Details of the analytical framework, methods, and findings are reported in the associated publication: <i>“‘Watershed Moment’ or ‘More Money to Steal’? South Africa’s COP26 Just Energy Transition Deal in News Media vs. Facebook Comments”</i> (currently under peer review with <i>Frontiers in Communication</i>).</p>References<p dir="ltr">Okoliko, D. A. (2025). Exploring Transition Tensions in Public Opinion on the COP26 Coal Phase-out Deal for South Africa as Expressed on Facebook. SUNScholarData. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.25413/sun.24297940.v1</p><p dir="ltr">Okoliko, D. A., and de Wit, M. P. (2024). Exploring Transition Tensions in Public Opinion on the COP26 Coal Phase-out Deal for South Africa as Expressed on Facebook. <i>Environmental Communication</i> 18, 1124–1146. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2024.2353081</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p><p dir="ltr"><br></p>