Institutional Fragility and the Conditional Transferability of Green Hydrogen Strategy Across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA): Heterogeneous Burdens, Shared Mechanism

Green hydrogen strategies proliferate across developing economies, yet most assume the planning authority possesses the state capacity, regulatory autonomy, and investment conditions that conflict-affected and fragile economies lack. Whether a strategy logic derived in one such context transfers to others with different institutional capacity remains untested. This study develops a Conflict-Affected Energy Transitions (CAET) framework and empirically examines its barrier gradient and conditional transferability propositions, analyzing at the country level a regional expert survey—data that prior single-case work, including the authors’ own, used only for binary external validation. A total of 137 energy experts across seventeen Arab states are grouped into three institutional clusters—conflict-affected/fragile, stable developing, and Gulf/high-capacity—and examined through cluster barrier and readiness profiles, a perceived-versus-predictive importance comparison, hierarchical clustering, and a Mode-A partial-least-squares path model with measurement invariance (MICOM) testing and permutation-based multi-group analysis. Energy justice and sovereignty are used as analytical and interpretive lenses, not as measured latent constructs in the structural model. Results show that barrier burdens follow a monotonic institutional fragility gradient: regulatory/institutional barriers rise from 3.02 (Gulf) through 3.52 (stable) to 4.06 (fragile), where they are the most severe constraint. Moreover, the perceived–predictive divergence—social barriers are rated least severe yet associate most strongly with sustainability—recurs across the region. In addition, the model satisfies compositional invariance across fragile and stable clusters while equality of regulatory means and variances fails as expected, and no structural path differs detectably between them at the current sample size. The adoption–governance–sustainability mechanism is therefore provisionally comparable rather than definitively invariant. We propose conditional transferability: the mechanism travels, provisionally, while priorities must be re-weighted by institutional context. Policy implications are differentiated—institutions-first, community-scale pathways for fragile states; finance and market formation for stable developing states; export-scale deployment for high-capacity states—and the CAET framework offers a generalizable alternative to techno-economic determinism for hydrogen strategy under constrained sovereignty. In practical terms, energy ministries in fragile states should sequence rule-making, permitting authority, and community-scale pilots before committing deployment capital; stable developing states should concentrate on de-risking finance and forming early offtake markets; and high-capacity states can proceed directly to export-scale projects and regional standard setting.