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 overarching growth strategy. This article critically analyses the Clean Industrial Deal as a key component of the EU’s evolving industrial strategy, focusing on its implications 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 analyses 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 precaution and long-term ecological considerations. It finds that the Clean Industrial Deal has major potential to mainstream and integrate particularly climate change objectives into EU industrial, trade and competition policy. However, the jury is still out on how the Clean Industrial Deal fares in terms of other sustainability objectives such as biodiversity, pollution and resource sufficiency, but it nevertheless offers both opportunities and risks for sustainability.