I am an Assistant Professor of Business and Society at the Department of Society, Politics and Sustainability at ESADE Business School in Barcelona. As of June 2024, I will be Associate Professor of Sustainability Research at the University of Basel, Switzerland, leading the Sustainability Research Group. A political scientist by training, I am passionate about finding regulatory pathways toward sustainable economies that respect our planetary boundaries while meeting humanity’s needs. I have a specific topical interest in sustainable food systems and agricultural commodity production.

I received my PhD in Political Science from the University of Münster, Germany, and previously was a post-doctoral researcher at ETH Zurich and visiting researcher at Yale University. My research focuses on the transnational governance of sustainability in global value chains and the options of states, firms, NGOs and other actors to improve the environmental and social sustainability of commodity production. I place a special emphasis on the private governance of tropical agricultural commodities such as coffee and palm oil. My work is interdisciplinary by nature and seeks to put political economy, regulatory governance, and business in society scholarship in conversation.

The questions that fascinate me are the following: who defines and controls what sustainability means in the marketplace? What types of rule-making and enforcement mechanisms exist that govern these processes, and how effective are they in creating change? Do they set the right incentives for market actors, particularly those in the Global South, to adhere to them? As global production and consumption processes are threatening to erode our planet’s resources, what actions can states and non-state actors take to steer these processes into more amenable directions, and how do these actions work within the market framework?

My current projects include investigating the implementation of zero-deforestation commitments in the palm oil sector, the role of traders as sustainability governance actors, and the paradoxes of climate-smart coffee production.

My work on the effectiveness of private sustainability governance in the coffee sector has been widely recognized, inter alia with ESG’s Oran R. Young Prize, APSA’s Virginia M. Walsh Dissertation Award, and ECPR’s Giandomenico Majone Prize. It is published in the book “Selling Sustainability Short? The Private Governance of Labor and the Environment in the Coffee Sector” (2020, Cambridge University Press), which won the 2021 ONE Book Award by the Academy of Management as well as APSA’s 2022 Lynton Keith Caldwell Award.

I have further published in leading peer-reviewed journals including Nature Sustainability, Regulation & Governance, the Journal of Business Ethics, Business Strategy and the Environment, New Political Economy, the Journal of Economic Geography, Ecological Economics, and the Journal of Environmental Management.

I take a problem-focused approach to teaching that empowers my students to understand and find solutions to complex sustainability problems, and teach courses in business in society, sustainability governance, and political economy.

I am also an active member of my research community, inter alia as a research fellow of the Earth System Governance project, book review editor at Regulation & Governance, chair of the Sprout Book Award Committee of the International Studies Association’s Environmental Studies Section, and Steering Committee member of the ECPR Standing Group on Regulatory Governance, as well as founding member of the Standing Group’s Early Career Network. I regularly speak at industry events and make media appearances to share my insights with practitioners and the public at large.

Please contact me by email if you are interested in collaborating or would like me to speak at an event!