Alexander Elg, BA, MPP

I'm a PhD fellow with the Rethinking Entrepreneurship in Society research environment at the Department of Business Humanities and Law at Copenhagen Business School. I hold a BA in political science and international law from Sciences Po Paris, and a MPP from the same institution. In between academic positions, I have worked at Accenture, the European Commission, and the OECD.
My work focuses on European industrial policy and how structural and institutional constraints forces public policy and investment to mirror entrepreneurial logics. Specifically, I'm interested in exploring the evolving role of competition- and state aid law in shaping the bounds of European public investment, particularly in the context of the green transition. Continue scrolling for more on my current projects.

Education

• Sciences Po Paris

  2021 — 2023

  Master of Public Policy, Management & Public Affairs and Political Science Research (summa cum laude/top 1%).

  Selected for the 2022 Global Public Policy Network conference and the Research Track program.

• McGill University

  2018 — 2019

  Exchange year. Staff Writer for the European Students' Society, Member of the Cross-country Skiing Team.

• Sciences Po Paris

  2016 — 2019

  BA, Political Science and International Law (cum laude/top 10%). Activities: Volleyball, cheerleading, arts magazine, musical association.

Professional Experience

• Intern @ OECD

  May 2022 — August 2022

  Researched SME internationalisation for the "SME Scale-Up Phase II" project, focusing on network linkages and policy mapping.

• Legal and Policy Assistant @ European Commission

  Mar 2021 — Sep 2021

  Supported competition policy coordination and handled COVID-related State Aid notifications. Contributed to evaluations of postal and concessions directives.

• Content Review Analyst @ Accenture

  Aug 2019 — Jan 2020

  Ensured compliance of media content for the Nordic market, collaborated with clients and partners, and tested new tools.

How did Important Projects of Common European Interest (IPCEIs) become one of Europe’s most potent yet underexamined industrial policy tools? This paper answers that question by tracing how IPCEIs evolved into a legal and fiscal workaround within the EU’s state aid regime. Unlike existing work that treats IPCEIs as contemporary instruments, this is the first study undertaking a historical analysis of the Commission’s legal rulings and administrative interventions. Using archival research, participant observation, and expert interviews, it shows how the Commission leveraged innovation rhetoric and legal discretion to carve out space for strategic public investment in what some scholars term a developmental network state. Born in the 1970s energy crises, IPCEIs grew from ad hoc national responses into a supranational mechanism for steering critical industries. The paper highlights an underappreciated developmental mindset within EU institutions—revealing a fiscally constrained yet quietly interventionist evolution not easily accommodated by the ‘derisking state’ framework.

Abstract

Much of the existing work on industrial policy in emphasizes the role of geoeconomics, subsidies and green authoritarianism when explaining why China leapfrogged Europe on cleantech. This paper challenges this conventional thesis by showing that China’s dominance in the electric vehicle (EV) sector highlights critical shortcomings in Europe’s industrial and financial strategies. Specifically, while China’s industrial policy, rare earth abundance, and subsidies are often cited as key drivers of its success, this paper identifies three overlooked financial dimensions that underpin its leadership in cleantech innovation and EV manufacturing.
First, the People’s Bank of China has championed green-targeted monetary policies for over a decade, providing lower interest rates for cleantech industries across the EV value chain. In contrast, the European Central Bank’s (ECB) brief experiment with green-targeted lending in 2022 was abandoned, reflecting a reluctance to align monetary policy with industrial and climate objectives. This hesitancy has undermined Europe’s ability to support its EV sector effectively.
Second, China’s strategic state intervention in public infrastructure has proven transformative. Recognizing the market failures in EV infrastructure development, China prioritized the construction of a comprehensive nationwide charging network. Conversely, Europe deferred to market forces, resulting in inadequate infrastructure deployment. Despite possessing the financial capacity to scale EV infrastructure continent-wide, the European Union (EU) failed to mobilize public financial investment, leaving even Germany, a major automotive hub, vulnerable to the sector’s crisis.
Third, China’s coordinated financial ecosystem, comprising state-owned banks, government funds, and venture capital, has directed significant resources toward the EV value chain. In Europe, state-backed financial institutions have largely remained passive, lacking a cohesive strategy to support automotive electrification. This reliance on market-driven solutions has hindered Europe’s ability to compete effectively. As China cements its position as a global leader in green technology manufacturing and financing, Europe risks retreating into protective trade measures and narratives of global standard-setting on decarbonization. However, without bold financial interventions and coordinated industrial strategies, Europe faces further deindustrialization, forfeiting both its competitiveness and its ability to lead the green transition. Addressing these gaps is crucial for Europe to reclaim its industrial relevance and secure a sustainable future.

The EU’s Clean Industrial Deal implies a governmental revaluation of corporations in the European green transition. This paper contributes three claims on the power configuration in the nexus of states, corporations, and finance in the pursuit of sustainability objectives. Examining the recently popularised Important projects of common European interest (IPCEIs) we argue that the EU 1) has created a qualitatively novel industrial policy governance framework that allows European Member States—in close cooperation with the European Commission—to use fiscal resources to directly fund corporate projects in a new form of public-private partnership independent of financial intermediaries. IPCEIs allow for direct public investment and planning in the real economy, so long as projects contribute to strategic objectives such as autonomy and sustainability.
At the same time and seemingly self-contradictory, IPCEIs signify 2) a return to financial information and share value as the ultimate site of veridiction for the rational behaviour of corporations and investors. Continuing the Juncker Commission ambition to ‘leverage’ public funds, IPCEIs intend to blend public and private funds through direct fiscal ‘derisking’ (Gabor, 2023). By adjusting the profitability and risk calculations of corporate ventures, IPCEIs effectively insert policy objectives into the financial metric of share value. IPCEIs constitute a form of dual derisking in that they make politically important projects interesting to corporations first and signals investibility to investors second.
Lastly, we claim that this pursuit of public goals for and through private success reconfigures rather than rejects financial capitalism. IPCEIs 3) bring to the fore a reconstruction of the centuries-old relationship between corporations as ‘franchise governments’ for the state (Ciepley, 2013). We argue that IPCEIs reconfigure European state-corporate relations in enabling the EU to counter corporate jurisdiction shopping, by the offering extraordinary privileges (state aid) accompanied by extraordinary demands to serve the (European) public good (common interest).
We find the IPCEI case to represent a ‘re-politicisation’ of corporations that is paradoxically premised on the conditions of financial capitalism. While this recasting provides unprecedented opportunities for pursuing EU policy objectives, it simultaneously rests on the capital-accommodating strategy of carrots over sticks. This leaves the decarbonisation of the European economy to a questionable hope: that corporations and investors will find decarbonisation rational for their self-interests in the pursuit of carrots.

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