Our projects cover research on current issues relating to international commercial law and corporate finance law, sustainable supply chains and responsible contracting, the impact of AI and Bitcoin, international commercial arbitration, and Business and Human Rights.
- Sustainability in the Agri-Food Supply Chain
- Interests of third party
- Good faith
- Decentralised Right to Breathe (Breayz DAO)
- Tokenised Environmental Rights and Collective Governance
- Dunya Kahawa DAO: Fair Trade 3.0 and Cooperative Supply-Chain Finance
- Futarchy and Financial Instruments for Climate Governance
Project abstracts
Project lead: Dr Catherine Pedamon
Commercial contracts are often assumed to govern economic relationships by clearly defining rights, obligations and prices. Yet, many businesses rarely rely on written contracts in their everyday dealings. This project examines that disconnect by studying agri-food supply chains, where long-term relationships, trust and informal practices frequently outweigh formal legal terms. Using interviews and contract analysis, the research explores how contracts are understood, ignored, adapted or strategically sideline in practice.
Project lead: Dr Daniela Gandorfer
This research explores a transformation in how normativity is produced as law and governance are increasingly privatized and embedded in markets, infrastructures, and technical systems. Normative order is expressed less through public legislation and democratic procedures alone, and more through market design, platforms, protocols, and financial architectures that shape participation, incentives, and outcomes. Jurisdictional entrepreneurship names the active role of private and hybrid actors in designing these environments and the value functions they enact, often across public–private and transnational settings. The project examines what this shift means for democratic processes, legitimacy, accountability, and collective decision-making when governance is exercised through infrastructure rather than formal legal authority.
Substantively, the group could focus on new digital technologies and on questions such as how normativity is increasingly produced through market design, technical infrastructures, and financial architectures rather than through formal law and regulation; what the privatization and hybridization of governance means for democratic processes, legitimacy, and accountability; how value functions—who benefits, who decides, who bears risk—are encoded in decentralized infrastructures and incentive systems; and what new forms of public–private or community–private collaboration emerge when governance is exercised through platforms and infrastructures rather than traditional institutions.
In terms of application context, as discussed, the group could operate explicitly as a Horizon preparation group. It would be anchored in an existing collaboration between the University, a non-profit partner (LoPh), and a for-profit implementation partner, centred on an ongoing project in decentralized air governance and public health. This project is developing a live, decentralized air-pollution infrastructure and already brings together university and industry partners, has secured over USD 150,000 in funding, and has received international recognition and awards. This provides a strong real-world foundation on which we could jointly build a competitive Horizon proposal.