From Production to Participation Conditions: Gate-Based Governance Across Battery, Semiconductor, and Petrochemical Value Chains(v1.4)

This paper examines how market participation in contemporary industrial value chains is increasingly shaped not by production capacity or formal legal prohibition, but by conditional access mechanisms that operate without explicit exclusion decisions. Drawing on cross-industry evidence from the battery, semiconductor, and petrochemical sectors, the paper introduces the concept of “gates” as participation conditions that determine market access while allowing production and formal legality to persist. Building on publicly available regulatory texts, standards, and corporate compliance requirements, the paper shows that these gates function through eligibility criteria, verification processes, certification regimes, and service dependencies that delay, suspend, or condition participation without invoking bans or ownership restrictions. Rather than interpreting recent changes in global value chains as deglobalisation or reshoring, the paper reframes them as a reconfiguration of participation conditions. Methodologically, the paper develops a gate-based analytical framework and applies it consistently across three structurally distinct industries to demonstrate the recurrence of similar access constraints. By doing so, it distinguishes gate-based governance from traditional regulatory control, capacity constraints, and one-off policy decisions. The paper does not propose policy solutions, but instead provides a conceptual structure for analysing how market participation is governed through conditional access in complex industrial systems. This paper is intended as a conceptual and analytical framework. It does not assess effectiveness, propose policy solutions, or provide normative recommendations.