On 29 and 30 January 2026, the DFG Research Training Group “Standards of Governance” held its midterm conference in the Casino building at Goethe University Frankfurt. Under the title “Standards, Governance and Global Transformations”, international experts and members of the Research Training Group discussed how standard-setting shapes international politics.
The conference opened with welcoming remarks delivered by the program speakers Jens Steffek (Technische Universität Darmstadt) and Sandra Seubert (Goethe Universität Frankfurt), to the 50 guests. In the first panel, “Legitimacy challenges of sustainability standards for (global) supply chains,” Almut Schilling-Vacaflor (Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg), Christian Scheper (Universität Duisburg-Essen) and Lena Gigerl (Technische Universität Darmstadt), chaired by Julia Drubel (Technische Universität Darmstadt), addressed the question of whether the establishment of standards is an effective and legitimate way to regulate international supply chains.
In the second panel, chaired by Charles Thiebaud (Goethe Universität Frankfurt), Axel Marx (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Ellen Mangnus (Wageningen Universiteit), Sebastian Oberthür (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and Ashok Ganesh (European Committee for Standardisation CEN) discussed the practical implementation of standards in Europe’s ecological transformation and their potential to make trade more sustainable.
Ellen Mangnus summarized the current EU negotiation processes:
“There is a lot of contestation nowadays in these changing geopolitical times. There are a lot of non-Western values popping up and claiming more space. So, when it comes to sustainable trade, I think we need to make sure that diverse voices and knowledge are represented in standard setting.”
The first day concluded with a keynote speech by Eleni Tsingou (Handelshøjskolen i København) entitled “Global standard setting in uncertain times—’small’ institutions as anchors of multilateralism.” Drawing on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the Danish researcher analysed the conditions under which international organisations remain resilient amid the current crisis of multilateralism.
The second day of the conference opened with the panel “Standards and the Digital Transformation” led by Lea Radke (Goethe Universität Frankfurt) and Sebastian Jaschke (Technische Universität Darmstadt). Lena Ulbricht (Universität Hildesheim) and Lucas von Ramin (Technische Universität Dresden) highlighted the challenges facing democratic states when attempting to set standards in and for the digital world. While Lena Ulbricht examined the legality and legitimacy of digital platforms using Roblox as an example, Lucas von Ramin explored the question of “[h]ow do digital technologies reshape political perception and normativity.”
In the fourth panel, “Standards, infrastructure, and the governance of natural ecosystems”, Karen Siegel (Universität Münster), Daniela Triml-Chifflard (Philipps Universität Marburg), Selen Eren (Oulun Yliopisto) and Julia Drubel presented various ecosystems and their utilisation, use and regulation. Chaired by Andrea Heigl (Technische Universität Darmstadt), the discussion focused on how standards regulate human intervention in these systems and how these standards are contested.
The conference concluded with a panel discussion featuring Nils Brunsson (Uppsala Universitet), Martha Lampland (University of California San Diego) and Allison Loconto (Université Gustave Eiffel). Jens Steffek led the open discussion on the topic of “Finding a common language? Past trajectories and future avenues of standardization research.” The panel opened perspectives for future standardization research and at the same time underlined its continuing importance and the need for further conceptual development. “The main takeaways for me are that standards and norms are not politically neutral; they have a political ordering effect and also demonstrate power relations between different actors,” was Daniela Triml-Chifflard’s conclusion of the conference.
Taken together, the discussions over the two days underscored that standards are neither merely technical instruments nor neutral coordination devices. Rather, they operate as infrastructures of global governance that structure markets, shape political authority, and redistribute power across actors and regions. In times of geopolitical contestation and accelerating ecological and digital transformation, questions of legitimacy and inclusion become central to standard-setting processes. The midterm conference thus not only mapped current research debates but also sharpened the conceptual and empirical agenda for the coming years of the Research Training Group.
An overview of the complete English-language programme of the conference can be found here.
