Actors, technology and geography: arenas of political economy for industrial decarbonisation policy in the United Kingdom

Abstract Industrial decarbonization (ID) involves significant uncertainty about technical and economic pathways, and it interacts with industrial and trade policy. The UK has been an early leader in ID efforts, developing a specific strategy and a set of deployment policies in the early 2020 s, with a strong focus on carbon capture and storage (CCS) and hydrogen, and a regional ‘cluster’ approach. In this article, we assess the policy choices the UK has made, through the application of a novel framework for analyzing their ‘arenas of political economy’. This framework incorporates three arenas of potential conflict: one over the distribution of policy costs and benefits across actors, a second over the distribution of policy resources between decarbonization solutions or technologies, and a third over the geographical distribution of benefits across industries and the spatial politics of regions. We show that the UK has developed a strong industrial decarbonization policy despite weak industrial policy and an unsupportive institutional context, driven by a stronger advocacy coalition and attempts at redistributing spatial resources to level up deprived regions. However, ID policy also risks being over-complex, being captured by particular technology advocacy groups, and losing credibility and support by concentrating resources too narrowly in particular regions.