EU’s Clean Industrial Deal: A Risk or an Opportunity for Sustainability?

The European Commission published the Clean
Industrial Deal in February 2025 with a view to bridge
climate action and competitiveness under one over-
arching growth strategy. This article critically analyses
the Clean Industrial Deal as a key component of the
EU’s evolving industrial strategy, focusing on its impli-
cations for achieving broad sustainability goals. It
draws on the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) to allow
for a structured and theoretically supported analysis of
how different aspects of the Deal may contribute to, or
hinder, systemic change. In doing so, the article ana-
lyses whether the measures proposed in the Clean
Industrial deal shift the regulatory balance in ways
that compromise the EU’s environmental commitments
put forward in the 2019 Green Deal, particularly in
cases where speed and flexibility are prioritized over
energy solutions. Second, it aims to foster lead markets by
generating demand for clean technologies produced in Eur-
ope, notably through public procurement and industrial pol-
icy instruments. Third, it addresses financing by mobilizing
both public and private investments to support the green
transition. Fourth, it promotes circularity and material effi-
ciency, including increased recycling and secure access to
critical raw materials. Fifth, it enhances global reach through
the development of fair and green international partnerships.
Sixth, it focuses on skills and quality employment, support-
ing a socially just transition by investing in workforce train-
ing and improving working conditions. Together, these six
business drivers provide the structure through which the
Clean Industrial Deal seeks to make decarbonization a
source of industrial competitiveness and resilience within
the EU.2
The Clean Industrial Deal represents the most signifi-
cant and comprehensive growth-oriented strategy intro-
duced since the launch of the European Green Deal in
2019.3 In the past six years, the European Green Deal has
resulted in numerous legislative packages across sectors,
seeking to address the key environmental crises of biodi-
versity loss, climate change and environmental pollution
and emphasizing the need to transform the European
economy.4 While the Green Deal placed environmental
sustainability at the centre of EU policy, the Clean Indus-
trial Deal reaffirms the Union’s climate commitments but
shifts the focus more decisively toward industrial compe-
titiveness and the EU’s response to security concerns and
precaution and long-term ecological considerations. It
finds that the Clean Industrial Deal has major poten-
tial to mainstream and integrate particularly climate
* Dr Associate Prof. of European Law (energy law) at the
change objectives into EU industrial, trade and com-
University of Eastern Finland’s Centre for Climate Change,
Energy and Environmental Law (CCEEL) and a part-time
petition policy. However, the jury is still out on how the
Prof. at the European University Institute.
Clean Industrial Deal fares in terms of other sustain-
ability objectives such as biodiversity, pollution and
Email: [email protected]. ** Dr Prof. and the Co-Director of the Research Centre for
resource sufficiency, but it nevertheless offers both
Environment, Economy and Energy at the Brussels School of
Governance; Prof. (part-time) of economic and environmental
opportunities and risks for sustainability.