Authors

Franco Galdini¹;  ¹ University of Birmingham, UK

Discussion

This article explains the limits to ‘green’ industrial policy in resource-rich countries through its basis in raw material extraction, using the case study of electric vehicle (EV) production in Uzbekistan. I argue that, as with past attempts to promote late industrialisation, state efforts to promote ‘green’ industrialisation in resource-rich countries rely upon cross-subsidisation from natural resource rents. This leads to a reliance on the import of obsolete foreign technology, creating internationally-uncompetitive industries serving the domestic market, whose scale can only absorb a fraction of the workforce. As such, the ‘addition’ of critical raw materials to the industrial subsidy mix in resource-rich countries leaves large sections of the population in the condition of surplus, exposing them to work- and environment-related precarity. In Uzbekistan, industrial policy has allocated raw material export rents and (now-critical) copper-based industrial inputs to support EV manufacturing via obsolete technology from Chinese Multinational Corporation BYD. Like all other manufacturing industries in resource-rich Uzbekistan, however, BYD Uzbekistan has been mostly producing for the domestic market, whose restricted scale limited employment creation and resulted in widespread precarity. Men occupy the few secure industrial jobs; women enter manufacturing in high-turnover low-skill-and-pay positions, juggling precarious labour and the increasing burden of reproductive work in a changing climate. Therefore, the case of Uzbekistan illustrates the limits to extractivism-based ‘green’ industrial policy, evident in the presence of large reservoirs of surplus populations bearing the socio-ecological costs of the clean energy ‘addition’.