Public institutions for cleantech commercialization in the United States

Abstract The United States has been building public institutions to promote cleantech commercialization since the 1970s oil crisis. The ascent of new industrial policy has accelerated this process substantially since 2020, resulting in a doubling of the total number of institutions by 2024. Introducing a dataset of 122 institutions, we show how institutions perform five functions: goal setting, coordination, derisking, imposing discipline, and external engagement. Further, we demonstrate how post-2020 institutions extend and diverge from historical trends, highlighting the recent buildout of planning capacity, the widespread use of conditionalities, and the pivot toward engagement with local and non-firm actors. We conclude with an analysis of how the second Trump administration is transforming the cleantech commercialization system through retrenching, redesigning, repurposing, and maintaining institutions. We offer a bottom-up, institution-level examination of the emergence and evolution of state capacity for green industrial policy in the United States, its functions, and current developments. Acknowledgements The authors thank the following individuals for assistance with data collection: Valeria Espino, Elery Loggia, Krisha Nair, Taylor Rubly, Sadie Shoemaker. Funding This work was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (No. 2023-21095). J.M. acknowledges additional funding from the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Business; the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, grant #2022-01804-GRA, regranted by the Climate Program of the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative; and the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Hatch Project Accession Number 1020688. Author information Authors and Affiliations Corresponding author Ethics declarations Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests. Additional information Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Source data Rights and permissions Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. About this article Cite this article Finkelstine, E., Diaz Anadon, L. & Meckling, J. Public institutions for cleantech commercialization in the United States. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-76484-6 Received: Accepted: Published: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-76484-6