Strategic Hedging and the Geoeconomics of the Net-Zero Transition: Kazakhstan’s External Engagement on Clean Energy

The global transition toward net zero has been accompanied by intensifying competition for technological leadership and access to critical resources, as well as by a renegotiation of the rules governing international economic engagement. In this context, many emerging economies have sought to secure advantageous positions within evolving green supply chains and to extract benefits from heightened great power rivalries. Central Asia has been no exception. Hydrocarbon-rich Kazakhstan—the region’s largest economy and an aspiring middle power (Cornell, 2024) known for its long-standing multi-vector foreign policy—has increasingly viewed the net-zero transition, together with escalating rivalries between China and the United States and between Russia and the West, as an opening for engaging in “strategic hedging” (Jin & Kim, 2025). Kazakhstan has expanded climate-, energy-, and cleantech-related cooperation with a wide range of external actors, seeking to attract foreign investment, promote technology transfer, and secure reputational gains, while refraining from explicit alignment. This approach has been reinforced by Kazakhstan’s growing geopolitical prominence following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, as well as by China’s shifting emphasis toward overseas investment in cleantech manufacturing (Xue & Larsen, 2025). The paper will trace Kazakhstan’s emerging hedging strategies across five key domains of the net-zero transition: renewable energy deployment, cleantech manufacturing, nuclear energy, critical raw materials, and hydrogen. From the early 2010s, Kazakhstan has positioned itself as Central Asia’s “green pioneer,” becoming the first country in the region to introduce renewable energy support schemes, deploy utility-scale wind and solar power, establish an emissions trading system, and adopt a net-zero pledge. More recently, the government has placed greater emphasis on localization, backing initiatives to establish wind turbine and battery manufacturing with Chinese partners. In nuclear energy, Kazakhstan—already the world’s leading producer of uranium—has pursued ambitions to develop nuclear power plants and expand into higher value-added segments of the nuclear fuel cycle (Pan, 2024). Here, it has carefully balanced cooperation with Russia and China, while also maintaining engagement with the United States. In the domain of critical raw materials, Kazakhstan, as Central Asia’s most resource-endowed country (Vakulchuk & Overland, 2021), has sought to capitalize on rising international attention by attracting foreign finance and technology to develop domestic processing capabilities. By contrast, its approach to hydrogen has been more cautious, reflecting skepticism among policymakers regarding the commercial viability of large-scale hydrogen exports. However, Kazakhstan’s strategic hedging has also faced constraints. One of the most significant has been intensifying regional competition, particularly from neighbouring Uzbekistan. Despite a much later start, Uzbekistan has overtaken Kazakhstan in total installed renewable energy capacity and, in 2024, in total FDI inflows. It has also recorded the fastest growth in Chinese investment into the power sector and manufacturing. Domestically, Uzbekistan’s stronger industrial policy legacy has enabled more effective technology transfer and localization, notably in electric mobility. The paper will contribute to debates on strategic hedging and the self-positioning of middle powers in the net-zero transition, while addressing an existing research gap in the literature on climate change and decarbonization in Central Asia.