The rise of low-carbon industrialism: how the world economy is reconfigured through production, regulation, and space

This article conceptualises low-carbon industrialism as a conceptual tool for studying the emerging planning order through which capitalism is being reorganised. While scholarship on green industrial policy has shown how states use regulation to align climate goals with competitiveness, it often treats production, labour, regulation, and space in partial ways. I argue that a broader framework is needed to theorise how these dimensions are reconfigured together. The concept of low-carbon industrialism thus provides a framework for understanding a new accumulation regime and the uneven spatial, labour, and regulatory transformations reshaping the world economy.This process is transforming the hierarchies between core and peripheral regions of the world economy and is driven by a myriad of actors, including labour unions and mining firms. Therefore, we need to understand these multiscalar processes as unfolding, relational, and contingent. Hence, this article calls for three analytical moves: first, overcoming Cartesian dualism and paying attention to working-class environmentalism; second, adopting a socio-legal approach to understand lawfare; and third, understanding low-carbon industrialism as a global, relational process by scrutinising the regulatory power and productive capacity of regions.