Reconfiguring industry in the United Kingdom. Global lessons for ambition versus policy on the path towards net-zero

High-emitting industrial processes are often concentrated in clusters that share infrastructure to maximise efficiency and reduce costs. These clusters, prevalent in many industrialised economies, pose significant challenges for decarbonisation due to their dependence on energy-intensive systems and legacy assets. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is frequently promoted as a key solution for reducing emissions in these hard-to-abate sectors. Drawing on an adapted ‘Multi-Level Perspective’ framework (Geels and Turnheim, 2022), this paper examines how industrial practices are being reconfigured in response to decarbonisation imperatives. While our study focuses on the UK, the findings have broader relevance to other industrialised nations pursuing a similar strategy. We observe a dominant reliance on fuel switching and CCS, characterising the innovation style as ‘modular substitution’; incremental changes that replace individual components without fundamentally transforming the overall system. This pattern suggests a gap between ambitious climate commitments and the depth of systemic change being pursued. Without more comprehensive strategies, there is a growing risk of delayed emissions reductions and increased residual emissions, both contributing to the overshooting of carbon budgets, which will be compounded if replicated across industrial sectors worldwide.