Dr. Franca Angela Bülow

What sparked your interest in researching sustainability in global value chains?

I became interested in global value chains while studying how environmental and social harms are outsourced across borders, often beyond the reach of national regulation. The governance challenges they pose, across sectors, jurisdictions, and scales, make them a crucial site for thinking about responsibility, justice, and sustainability in a globally connected world.

What is the focus of your current research, and what impact do you hope it will have?

My current work investigates how EU due diligence laws affect sustainability and human rights in global supply chains. I combine systematic evidence reviews, systems thinking, and discourse analysis to understand both outcomes and perceptions of these laws. I hope the research contributes to better understanding of regulatory dynamics and governance effects and supports more inclusive and effective approaches to sustainability governance.

What do you see as the biggest knowledge gaps in sustainable global value chains?

We still know too little about how sustainability regulations actually play out across different tiers of supply chains, especially in terms of their unintended consequences. There's also a lack of integrative research that bridges legal, political, and socio-ecological perspectives, and that takes stakeholder perceptions seriously as part of evaluating policy effectiveness

How do you hope to collaborate with others in this research network?

I believe that complex questions need complex - inter- & transdisciplinary - answers. I am excited about the opportunity to work towards understanding the complexity that sustainabilty governance of global value chains brings with the GO-Chains team, our advisory board and wider network.

I’m keen to exchange empirical findings and learn more about different methodological approaches, co-develop conceptual frameworks, and work on joint publications. I particularly value opportunities to link academic work with practitioner perspectives to make our insights more actionable and relevant.