Charline Depoorter is a Postdoctoral researcher in the Sustainability Research Group at the University of Basel (Switzerland). Her main research interests lie in transnational sustainability governance in global agri-food value chains and in trade more broadly, with a particular focus on the institutional design and implementation of both private and public sustainable global value chains governance initiatives, and interactions with political economy. She conducted her PhD at the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies and at the Division of Bioeconomics, KU Leuven (Belgium), in which she investigated the institutional design effectiveness and implementation of voluntary sustainability standards as private market-based governance instruments for sustainable development in the agricultural and forestry sectors, with a case study on the Indonesian cocoa sector. She has field work experience in Indonesia and has previously worked for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva. She pays particular attention to the policy relevance of her research and often collaborates with international organizations.
Paulina Flores Martinez is a Postdoctoral researcher working at the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of York (UK). Her PhD research explored the sustainability governance of two key forest-risk commodities, soy in Brazil and beef in Mexico. She is interested in the interactions between private, voluntary and traditional sustainability regulatory mechanisms. Her current research is located at the intersection of International Political Economy, Transnational Environmental Governance and Global Environmental Politics. Prior to joining academia, she worked at public servant and consultancy positions in Mexico. She gained experience with both rural and urban policies around climate change adaptation and mitigation.
Scott Hamilton is a PhD researcher at the University of Antwerp writing a thesis about the politicization of EU trade agreement negotiations. His research explores the dynamics of coalition formation through the willingness of political actors to appropriate the concerns of others. He teaches political economy and research design in Antwerp and at ESPOL in Lille. Prior to joining academia, his pursuits included urban ecology, migrant rights, market gardening, and music.
Simon Happersberger is a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the UN University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies. He is interested in the nexus of international trade, environmental sustainability, and political economy. In his PhD he investigates the effectiveness of EU policy instruments on sustainable trade. Simon collected first professional experiences at the European Parliament, the German Institute for International Affairs and the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation Madagascar. He studied political science and German philology in Goettingen, Paris, Berlin and Cape Town.
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Former Organiser
Asgeir Barlaup is a PhD Researcher affiliated with the project 'POLYCARBON' (2020-2024) at KU Leuven in Belgium. He is interested in costly climate policies and the political economy of electricity provision. In his PhD he investigates mitigation policies targeting the electricity sector in the Republic of Korea. He obtained a master’s degree in international environmental and resource policy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and has previously worked as a trainee at the Norwegian embassy in Washington D.C.