My research investigates the EU’s trade-environmental policies, namely climate-related provisions in the EU’s preferential trade agreements and its unilateral instruments. I also work on the intersection between international climate and economic governance, in particular interlinkages between the Paris Agreement and trade policy.
More broadly, I’m interested in international cooperation, sustainable development, EU trade policy and politics, planetary commons (and climate change specifically), institutional interlinkages, questions around international legitimacy and global political economy.
In my PhD, I analysed trade and sustainable development (TSD) provisions in the EU’s preferential trade agreements, with a particular focus on climate aspects and the drive for more robust enforcement. The research integrated frameworks and insights from social constructivism, poststructuralism, foreign policy analysis, doctrinal research, and social network analysis to provide a more nuanced understanding of how TSD chapters fit into the EU’s broader trade-sustainability agenda, how they are designed, what purpose they serve, and what impact they have.
In my postdoctoral research, I have extended this focus to the EU’s unilateral trade-environmental instruments, specifically the carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) and the regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR), from the perspective of trade partners in the Global South. These measures have triggered vast political contestation, which I explore through a mixed-methods, cross-domain approach that moves beyond surface-level variables (e.g., expected economic impact and strategic discourse) to chart the nuances in Global South countries’ perceptions and contestations of these policies. In doing so, I reflect on how the EU might have designed more legitimate instruments and consider the implications for global governance more broadly.
