Transformative innovation policy, intervention points and carbon management in the EU: a multi-system case study

This paper examines how, during a 25-year timeline from 2000 to 2025, the European Union (EU) has used climate, industrial and environmental policy to shape the emergence of an integrated carbon management system (CMS). It assesses the extent to which the evolving framework exhibits characteristics consistent with transformative innovation policy (TIP). The CMS is conceptualised as an emergent, policy-driven ‘interconnected system complex’ centred on carbon capture and storage (CCS), carbon capture and utilisation (CCU) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR), linked to multiple socio-technical systems. Methodologically, the study undertakes qualitative analysis of 114 binding and non-binding EU policy documents, over the timeline. An adapted version of Kanger, Ghosh and Entsalo’s (2025) Intervention Points Framework (IPF), grounded in the multi-level perspective, multi-system interaction literature, policy mix research and TIP debates is used as the analytical lens. The IPF is refined to address formation of an emergent, socio-technical configuration, rather than transition in more stable, established meso-level systems. The paper makes a number of important empirical and conceptual contributions. Empirically, the study reveals both the depth and shallowness of policy leverage across different intervention points and establishes that the transformative potential of the emergent CMS is real but ambivalent and contested. Conceptually, the study illustrates how policy may be used as a vehicle for observing and describing evolving systemic structures and flows and their directionality, and the iterative processes of formation and change which define them. The study also enables insights about the political nature of the ‘landscape’ level of the MLP, and the importance of the policymaking paradigm, for determining the potential of policy to drive transformational change.