By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 07

Every new industry arrives before the vocabulary to regulate it. Namibia is governing one into being.

Every new industry arrives before the vocabulary to regulate it, and green hydrogen is arriving in Namibia faster than the country can write the rules. The government’s position, set out as it pressed ahead in June 2026, is that existing statutes are enough for now. The deeper question is conceptual: can laws designed for other industries govern one that did not exist when they were drafted.

This is not merely a drafting delay. It is a study in how a state governs the future before that future has a settled shape, holding an emerging sector together with institutions and borrowed rules while the dedicated framework is still being imagined.

The problem of governing by analogy

The current approach treats green hydrogen as a bundle of familiar things. It is water use under the Water Resource Management Act, power under the Electricity Act, and an environmental matter under the Environmental Management Act. Each analogy captures part of the industry and none captures the whole, because a green hydrogen project is a new combination no single existing law was built to see.

Governing by analogy is a reasonable first move, but analogies leak. The gaps appear at the joints, in questions of certification, export classification and long-term tenure that fall between the older statutes. Those joints are exactly where a purpose-built law would do its work.

Old laws describe the parts of hydrogen; none of them describes the whole.

Institutions as the bridge before statute

Namibia has leaned on institutions to hold the space the law has not yet filled. A hydrogen programme run from the centre of government, a council to coordinate policy, and a directorate now drafting the bill together form a scaffolding of bodies standing in for a settled legal framework. This is governance by institution ahead of governance by statute.

Scholarly work on the region reads this as future-making: a study of green hydrogen governance in Namibia and South Africa frames the state as actively constructing an industry and its rules in tandem, rather than regulating something that already exists. The institutions are how a country acts on a future it has decided to build.

When the statute is missing, the institution becomes the rule.

Certification as intellectual infrastructure

The most consequential rules may not concern tax or tenure but proof. For Namibian hydrogen to command a premium it must be certified as genuinely low-carbon to buyers whose own regulations demand it, and certification is a framework of standards, audits and definitions rather than a physical asset. It is intellectual infrastructure, and it is largely still to be designed.

Getting that framework right is a competitive act, not only a compliance one. A credible national certification scheme becomes part of the country’s intellectual property, a reason buyers trust Namibian molecules over unlabelled ones. Building it badly, or late, would hand that advantage to jurisdictions that moved first.

In a decarbonised market, the certificate is the product as much as the molecule.

The limits of a bill by year-end

The directorate expects a draft before parliament by the close of 2026, which is progress, but a single act cannot answer every conceptual question at once. New industries generate rules iteratively, as disputes reveal what the first draft missed, and a framework this novel will be revised for years after it passes. The first statute is a beginning, not a settlement.

The theoretical caution is against false completion: treating the passage of a law as the moment the governance problem is solved. The harder task is designing a framework flexible enough to be corrected as the industry teaches its regulators what it actually is.

A first law closes the gap; it does not end the argument about the rules.

For a regulator, an adviser or a policy scholar, Namibia offers a live experiment in governing an industry into being rather than after the fact. The decision facing its lawmakers is whether to aim for a comprehensive statute that risks being outdated on arrival, or a deliberately adaptable framework that expects to be rewritten as green hydrogen reveals what governing it really requires.

Sources: The Namibian; Governance of future-making: green hydrogen in Namibia and South Africa (Geoforum); Ministry of Industries, Mines and Energy