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Embracing green uncertainty: What does it mean in practice? This lesson is becoming even more relevant as countries confront the challenge of green industrialization. The transition to a low-carbon economy is not simply about replacing fossil fuels with renewables. It is about building new industries, mastering new technologies and reshaping production systems across entire economies, with many technologies at the height of their cost curves and many innovations proving particularly disruptive. It is not only green technologies that dramatically evolve; markets also shift with changing consumer demand and regulatory norms (such as sudden tariff wars), while geopolitical crises disrupt supply chains. Still, the way the green transition is often discussed falls for ready-made models and technologies to bet on. Over the past three years, it was green hydrogen’s turn to become the silver bullet for development. While many developing nations (including Chile and Namibia, to name but two) have embraced the idea of green hydrogen-based industrialization, often on the back of policy strategies offered by foreign development agencies over domestic planning, the required cost reductions for green hydrogen production and radical changes in electrolysis technology have already made these policy strategies obsolete. When governments mimic someone else’s policy strategy, the result is a familiar development trap: vision plans that look impressive on paper but fail to generate learning on the ground. As the Mauritian economist Isabelle Ramdoo once told me, having a vision is good, but vision without realistic implementation is a hallucination. Countries that succeed in green industrialization will not necessarily be those that choose the “right” sectors from the start. They will be those that build institutions capable of navigating uncertainty, as the policies that work today may not work tomorrow. What does this mean in practice? It means that green industrialization requires what might be called “adaptive industrial policy”: a system that treats policy as a process of discovery rather than a one-off plan, and that not only invests in projects but in institutions capable of learning. Agencies that can monitor performance, adjust incentives and engage with firms. Civil servants who combine technical expertise with the autonomy to revise policies when strong new evidence comes to light. Mechanisms that allow governments to identify emerging opportunities rather than locking themselves into predetermined sectors for the next decade. By including independent monitoring and evaluation mechanisms, as well as technology foresight units into industrial policy governance, successive governments can avoid being locked into obsolete technological trajectories or persisting strategies long after their underlying rationale has eroded. Industrial policy: Shifting from bowling to curling That is why we need a curling, rather than a bowling, approach to industrial policy. In curling, a niche sport from Scotland, success does not depend solely on the initial throw, but on continuous adjustment as the stone moves across an uncertain and shifting surface. Players sweep the ice in real time, responding to changes in speed, friction and direction. By contrast, a “bowling” approach
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