Green protectionism: political economy aspects

This article examines the political economy of green protectionism as an emerging phenomenon in global trade, in which environmental objectives are combined with the goals of maintaining domestic industry and ensuring technological sovereignty. The central hypothesis is that the evolving regime of green protectionism represents a shift toward a model of selective market access, where entry is conditioned on compliance with environmental and technological standards unilaterally defined by the world’s largest economies. The aim of the study is to analyze the policy instruments employed by major economies to reshape the architecture of international trade by integrating climate objectives into industrial policy. The article focuses on a comparative analysis of key initiatives such as the European Green Deal (EGD), the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), drawing on sources from the WTO, UNCTAD, UNEP, UNIDO and official regulatory documents. The author systematizes the stages in developing green protectionism, identifies its core instruments, and highlights the distinctive features of current measures, including their extraterritorial impact and implications for developing countries. Special emphasis is placed on the drivers underlying the convergence between climate and industrial policy into a unified regulatory framework, and on the contrasting approaches of the European Union and the United States in shaping the new rules of global competition. The study concludes that green policy is increasingly being used as a strategic tool through which leading economies seek to consolidate their technological and economic dominance.

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