Published working papers
Fiscally constrained developmentalism: IPCEIs and the development of innovative European industrial policy
How did Important Projects of Common European Interest (IPCEIs) become one of Europe’s most potent yet underexamined industrial policy tools? This paper answers that question by tracing how IPCEIs evolved into a legal and fiscal workaround within the EU’s state aid regime. Unlike existing work that treats IPCEIs as contemporary instruments, this is the first study undertaking a historical analysis of the Commission’s legal rulings and administrative interventions. Using archival research, participant observation, and expert interviews, it shows how the Commission leveraged innovation rhetoric and legal discretion to carve out space for strategic public investment in what some scholars term a developmental network state. Born in the 1970s energy crises, IPCEIs grew from ad hoc national responses into a supranational mechanism for steering critical industries. The paper highlights an underappreciated developmental mindset within EU institutions —revealing a fiscally constrained yet quietly interventionist evolution not easily accommodated by the ‘derisking state’ framework.
Available at: https://ruc.dk/sites/default/files/2025-09/SECO_working_paper_2025-1.pdf
Works-in-progress
Brokering Europe: IPCEIs and camouflaged industrial policy
How does the European Union conduct ambitious industrial policy despite fiscal constraints and ordoliberal competition frameworks that prohibit vertical state intervention? This paper argues that Important Projects of Common European Interest (IPCEIs) answer this question by camouflaging industrial policy as innovation policy. Drawing on archival material, systematic legal analysis, and 26 expert interviews, I trace how a dormant treaty clause evolved from the stagflation economy of the 1970s into a powerful instrument of coordinated industrial governance. Two concepts explain this transformation. Institutional camouflage describes how industrial policy goals and instruments were embedded wholesale within the normatively credible framework of innovation policy. Nodal brokerage describes the governance mechanism this produced: by controlling the path of least resistance between member states and their own fiscal allocations, the European Commission has acquired substantive agenda-setting capacity without formal competence transfer. The Commission's exclusive authority to approve IPCEI designations positions it as the central node in the European industrial policy network, allowing it to coordinate member state action through the Joint European Forum for IPCEIs. These findings expand the developmental network state framework and illuminate a broader mechanism of power accumulation through strategic regulatory forbearance.
Green Steel in the Fracture: Economic Statecraft in a Decentered Developmental Network State
With Cornel Ban
This paper examines how economic statecraft operates in European middle powers under conditions of deep market integration and multi-level governance. Building on the economic statecraft and developmental network state (DNS) literatures, we theorise a distinct configuration: the decentered developmental network state. In this configuration, developmental capacities are present within the public sector, yet responsibility for direction-setting and risk-bearing is displaced away from the national centre. We argue that, under such conditions, supranational economic statecraft—most notably at the EU level—does not automatically translate into domestic structural transformation. Instead, its effectiveness is conditional on fragmented and politically contested national and subnational authorisation structures. Drawing on the case of green steel in Sweden, we show that industrial transformation has been driven less by a coherent national strategy than by the anchoring of EU-level DNS instruments into subnational alliances led by municipalities. While this arrangement can mobilise investment, it generates uneven and under-scaled outcomes when coordination and national political authorisation falter. The paper contributes to RIPE debates on state–market relations by rethinking economic statecraft in middle powers beyond both developmental and neoliberal ideal types.
Why discipline when you can subsidise? IPCEIs and the EU's lowered climate ambitions
With Tessa Barnow
Faced with geopolitical competition, the EU seems to have abandoned the idea that financial markets can discipline the green transition. Instead, it uses subsidies, with strings attached. Can subsidies do what regulation could not? In this paper, we examine Important Projects of Common European Interest—the EU’s ‘poster child’ (Schmitz et al., 2025) or ‘flagship’ (Lavery & Lopes-Valença, 2025) tool for state guided- and funded green investment—to see whether public money can close the climate funding gap. We find that IPCEIs are structurally limited, and not just because of the logics of the state aid framework. Their design actively encourages financialisation, leading to a contradictory and self-defeating policy regime.