Carbon dioxide removals (CDR) have become central to climate policy. Current policy approaches, however, are insufficient to create the basis for CDR technologies to scale because they are not yet aligned with the complexity shaping the emerging sector. In this article, we provide an approach to understanding the characteristics of CDR which we argue is composed of both market-creation and market-led complexity. Our engagement with market actors since 2020 suggests that we have entered this new paradigm of complexity earlier than was the case for renewables and in a different way due to the nature of demand. We illustrate how these complexity characteristics are not well captured by existing tools that support policymaking. And we provide an alternative approach to the support of decision-making which is both exploratory and participatory in nature. We call for governments to embrace new tools to facilitate engagement between the public and private sector actors in ways that can more directly capture the sector’s complexity. Public-private collaborations for the next phase of CDR investment will be needed to allow governments to both guide the sector whilst also providing a backstop to risk for private sector partners. Participatory and dialectic stakeholder deliberation processes should be integrated throughout analysis, policy design and cross-sector approaches rather than being thought of as separate in order to facilitate timely, targeted interventions that are robust to different possible futures.