Example: Johannesburg’s challenge-led climate collaboration
| City role | The City of Johannesburg plays a convening, brokerage, and enabling role, connecting city departments, business formations, innovators, academia, township-economy representatives, informal traders, and other spheres of government around shared economic-development and climate challenges. |
| Funding and revenue | The model currently relies on city coordination and partner support to resource engagement activities, including support from organisations such as ICLEI Africa. Johannesburg is also exploring additional funding to sustain regular dialogues and develop digital infrastructure, including a proposed green registry. |
| Operating model | Participation has evolved from broad representative engagement through the Johannesburg Business Forum (JBF) towards targeted, challenge-led participation. Businesses, innovators, academic institutions, and other stakeholders are invited based on the specific city problem being addressed and the solutions they can offer. |
| Scale and governance | Governance combines the JBF – chaired politically through the Member of the Mayoral Committee for Economic Development – with a newer city-wide Partnership Committee, chaired through executive leadership in the environmental department and involving executive directors from relevant departments. |
| Key partners | Key partners include the City of Johannesburg Department of Economic Development, the environmental department, business formations such as the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce and Industry, township-economy and informal-trader representative bodies, academia, innovators, ECL Africa, C40 Cities, and GCoM partners. |
Introduction and context
Johannesburg’s city-business climate collaboration is best understood as an evolution: from a broad, city-led business engagement forum towards more targeted platforms that start with a specific local challenge and bring together partners with the capability to help solve it. The Johannesburg Business Forum provided an important foundation for dialogue with organised business, but the city has increasingly recognised that climate-related and green-economy opportunities often require more focused engagement, more diverse participation, and clearer routes to implementation.
The current direction links climate action closely with economic development. Instead of treating climate action as a separate agenda, Johannesburg is using environmental challenges, such as landfill pressure, river regeneration, informal automotive activity, and green mobility, as entry points for job creation, skills development, innovation, and more inclusive economic participation.
How the partnership works
Johannesburg’s partnership model combines broad relationship-building with more focused problem-solving. The City uses established forums to maintain dialogue with business and representative organisations, while newer mechanisms such as co-creating workshops and green jobs fairs are being developed to identify specific climate and economic challenges, test potential solutions, and connect those solutions to the right city departments and partners.
From broad engagement to targeted collaboration
The Johannesburg Business Forum (JBF) was established as a city-led platform for organised business to raise operational issues affecting the local business environment, including service delivery, lighting, safety, land-use challenges, and other barriers to business retention. Over time, the City found that this broad model was useful for consultation and relationship-building, but less effective for resolving more specific climate and economic-development challenges.
This prompted a shift towards more granular engagement, including subcommittees and challenge-specific platforms. For example, Johannesburg’s previous collaboration with ICLEI Africa on a City–Business Collaboration Accelerator (CiBiX) workshop was a targeted, challenge-led approach to convening innovators and businesses around city priorities.
The City also has an Investment Fast-tracking and prioritisation Committee which serves as a strategic intervention mechanism to improve the ease of doing business in Johannesburg by facilitating and coordinating across municipal Departments. It serves as platform to address investment project issues and associated challenges that potential investors or businesses face. This is an effective tool to gain investor confidence, enhance turnaround times and reduce red-tape which makes it challenging to attract investment in the City. The Committee meets Monthly or as and when required.
Using governance to identify delivery partners
Johannesburg has also established a city-wide Partnership Committee to provide a more consistent process for assessing partnership proposals. Prospective partners submit a proposal, present it to the committee, and are assessed for alignment, relevance, and value to the City. Where alignment is confirmed, they receive a partnership letter that enables them to work with the relevant department. This gives officials greater confidence that due diligence has been completed, although practical alignment with implementing departments remains important.
Connecting climate action with local economic opportunity
Johannesburg’s approach is rooted in the idea that climate action can also address local economic needs. The Juskskei river regeneration project began as a community-led clean-up campaign in Alexandra and developed into a donor-funded, multidisciplinary project that creates jobs and supports recycling SMEs (read more here and here). The Alexandra Automotive Hub similarly turns an environmental and safety challenge linked to informal roadside mechanics into an opportunity for formalisation, training, and green-mobility skills, including electric-vehicle servicing and battery knowledge (read more here).