{
  "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.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "Boston University, Boston, MA USA",
    "Bennett Institute for Innovation and Policy Acceleration, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, UK",
    "Luiss Guido Carli, Viale Romania, Roma, Italy"
  ],
  "article_type": "research article",
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 5,
  "authors": [
    {
      "affs": [
        0,
        1
      ],
      "name": "Benjamin K. Sovacool"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        1
      ],
      "name": "Matthew Lockwood"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        1
      ],
      "name": "Marc Hudson"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        2
      ],
      "name": "Kyle S. Herman"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        1
      ],
      "name": "Marfuga Iskandarova",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-8565-2830"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/cg1ksc3e106cv.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.1038/s44432-026-00022-4",
  "fulltext_url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13736638/",
  "id": "cg1ksc3e106cv",
  "issns": [
    "3059-3271"
  ],
  "landing_url": "https://doi.org/10.1038/s44432-026-00022-4",
  "language": "en",
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "heading",
      "Article"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "2002|Climate Change Policy and Economics"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7225259446",
  "pdf_url": "https://www.nature.com/articles/s44432-026-00022-4.pdf",
  "pmcid": "PMC13736638",
  "pmid": "42991790",
  "published": "2026-11-04",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/cg1ksc3e106cv.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-11-09T12:22:02Z",
      "native_id": "PMC13736638",
      "source": "pmc",
      "url": "https://doi.org/10.1038/s44432-026-00022-4"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [],
  "title": "Actors, technology and geography: arenas of political economy for industrial decarbonisation policy in the United Kingdom",
  "title_text": "Actors, technology and geography: arenas of political economy for industrial decarbonisation policy in the United Kingdom",
  "type": "peer-reviewed",
  "updated_at": "2026-11-09T12:22:02Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/cg1ksc3e106cv",
  "venue": "Npj Environmental Social Sciences",
  "versions": []
}