For much of the past decade, the future of energy and infrastructure has been framed as a global transition towards a broadly common destination: progressively lower emissions, greater electrification, expanding renewable energy generation and a gradual reduction in the role of carbon-intensive activities. The Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015, provided the legal and political architecture for that vision, shaping investment decisions, regulatory frameworks and corporate strategies well beyond climate policy itself.
That earlier narrative now captures only part of a more complex reality. Decarbonisation remains a powerful driver of investment, regulation and technological change. It now sits alongside objectives that governments regard as equally important: energy security, affordability, industrial competitiveness, technological sovereignty, supply-chain resilience, control over strategic assets and resources and, increasingly, defence capability.
Against this backdrop, Baker McKenzie has developed a practical, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction overview of how governments are competing to attract and shape investment across energy, infrastructure and natural resources around the world — and what that means, in concrete legal and commercial terms, for the investors and developers who must navigate it.
The report explores:
- The policy objectives driving investment
- The principal programmes and incentives supporting those objectives
- Regulatory reforms designed to accelerate project development
- Supply chain and critical minerals strategies
- Outbound investment support
- Inbound investment screening
- Domestic participation requirements
- Key opportunities and risks investors should monitor
Key Findings
A world of common goals and divergent paths
Some policies continue to converge, while others are moving in markedly different directions, reshaping how and where capital is deployed.
The extraordinary surge in electricity demand from hyperscale data centre development and artificial intelligence infrastructure has made access to reliable power and a deliverable grid connection central to site selection, project valuation and financing. Governments seeking to attract digital investment are increasingly aligning data-centre policy with generation, transmission, storage and planning reforms.
Renewable energy continues to attract substantial policy support across most jurisdictions, but there is a material difference in the technologies governments are backing. Some jurisdictions have compressed incentive windows for established technologies such as wind and solar, whilst preserving a substantially longer runway for battery storage, geothermal, hydrogen, carbon capture and advanced manufacturing — a distinction already shaping capital allocation. Others maintain broad support across a wider range of technologies alongside hydrogen, nuclear and sustainable fuels as complementary pillars of their decarbonisation and competitiveness agendas.
Grid capacity and connection backlogs are a near-universal constraint. Governments are responding through expansion programmes and connection reforms prioritising viable, construction-ready projects, though implementation and its impact on project timelines remain uneven.
Renewed support for nuclear power reflects a wider, though not uniformly observed, policy trend. Several jurisdictions have repositioned nuclear as central to their energy security and decarbonisation agendas, with dedicated funding mechanisms for large-scale projects and SMRs. Yet in many countries it remains a longer-term aspiration, and the route from policy ambition to bankable project is still being built in most markets.
Access to critical minerals and strategic resources has become a matter of national importance, with its strategic rationale broadening beyond decarbonisation to encompass digital infrastructure and defence. Countries reliant on imported materials have adopted comprehensive policies to secure supply chains and strengthen domestic processing capacity. Resource-rich countries, by contrast, are seeking investment on terms that secure greater domestic participation in processing, technology transfer and industrial development — an approach reflected in policy measures across multiple jurisdictions.
One of the most visible areas of divergence concerns the future role of hydrocarbons. Some jurisdictions are actively reducing oil and gas production and consumption. Others regard hydrocarbons as essential to economic development, energy security and fiscal stability, and are encouraging continued upstream and midstream investment — many simultaneously pursuing significant renewable energy investment, reflecting a dual-track approach rather than a binary choice.
From Policy to Practice: What Investors Need to Consider
- The market is fragmenting along national and regional lines
While many jurisdictions share objectives around decarbonisation, economic growth and energy security, the balance struck between these goals varies significantly, creating a highly fragmented landscape for investors. Navigating that fragmentation requires investors to think in terms of portfolio exposure across diverging regulatory regimes, rather than applying a single cross-border investment thesis — what works in one jurisdiction may be structurally incompatible with another.
- Policy opens the door — the strongest opportunities arise where several objectives converge
Policy frameworks across all major jurisdictions are active and changing rapidly. The strongest opportunities arise not where a single incentive is generous, but where multiple policy objectives — such as energy security, industrial development, critical minerals and decarbonisation — reinforce one another, creating durable and overlapping support for the same project or sector.
- However, policy ambition does not, on its own, create a market
The principal risk is assuming that enactment equals implementation. Policy alignment strengthens an investment case — it does not establish it. The practical test is whether a favourable policy environment translates into durable and enforceable rights, creditworthy offtake, secured grid access and a contractual allocation of risk that a lender or equity investor can underwrite.