The green gauntlet: navigating instability, regulation, and commitment in the french industrial sector's ecological transition

The ecological transition of French industry is unfolding within an increasingly complex institutional environment marked by climate regulation, energy market instability and ambitious decarbonisation targets. This thesis conceptualises this context as a “green gauntlet”, defined as the cumulative effect of regulatory, economic, technological and political constraints reshaping industrial decision-making. Beyond ambition or financial effort, the dissertation advances a central hypothesis: the main challenge of the industrial transition lies in the lack of credible temporal coordination between public regulation, economic incentives and industrial investment horizons. Drawing on Neo-institutionalist theory and the political economy of climate regulation, the study examines interactions between European instruments—such as the EU Emissions Trading System, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive—and national energy reforms, notably the end of the ARENH mechanism in France. These frameworks impose immediate constraints, while long-term support mechanisms for low-carbon technologies remain uncertain or fragmented, generating investment ambiguity for capital-intensive technologies with long amortisation cycles. The empirical analysis relies on a qualitative case study of a major French industrial group positioned at the intersection of energy consumption and low-carbon technology supply. The findings show that the group combines regulatory alignment with investment prudence, sequencing its decarbonisation strategy in response to unstable and misaligned policy signals. The thesis concludes that the industrial transition is constrained less by technological limits than by failures of intertemporal governance, and that restoring temporal coherence between constraints, incentives and investment horizons is essential for competitive industrial decarbonisation.