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Paper short abstract

Anti-policy actors rejected the EU ETS's green growth rationale but kept its institutional architecture, repurposing it from a climate tool into an investment vehicle. This shows anti-policy works through normative deracination as well as destruction.

Paper long abstract

Climate anti-policy is typically understood as pro-fossil fuel policymaking or the weakening, rollback, and dismantling of existing climate institutions. This paper identifies a third form: the selective retention and repurposing of policy architecture because it remains politically, administratively, or economically useful. Drawing on a policy ecology/assemblage perspective and Millo and MacKenzie's (2009) concept of institutional "usefulness," the paper examines the 2026 review of the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). It shows that anti-policy actors rejected the ETS's green growth rationale while leaving its institutional architecture intact. This continuity enabled a shift from green growth to geopolitical competitiveness, repurposing the ETS from a climate policy instrument into an investment vehicle. This selective retention marks a further stage in the financialization of climate governance, extending financial logics from carbon trading to the assetization of policy institutions themselves. Anti-policy, it concludes, is not only a performative politics of destruction but a politics of normative deracination enacted through retention.