Thursday, 29 January 2026
12:30-13:00 Registration
13:00 Welcome and introduction by speaker team Jens Steffek and Sandra Seubert
13:15 – 14:45 Legitimacy Challenges of Sustainability Standards for (Global) Supply Chains
Negative impacts of companies’ activities on human rights and the environment often stem from accountability gaps in long, non-transparent, and transnationally intertwined supply chains. These gaps have prompted diverse standard-setting efforts. However, in practice the design of these measures is highly contested. Against this background this panel discusses the extent to which standard-setting constitutes an effective and legitimate governance approach to mitigate corporate externalities related to (global) supply chains.
Organized by Lena Gigerl and Julia Drubel
Coffee break
15:15 – 16:45 Governance through Standards: Practical Implementation & Application of Standards in Europe’s ecological transformation
In the context of socio-ecological transformations, new modes of governance through standards are emerging at both national and transnational scales. This panel aims to critically examine the role of standards as tools of governance and to explore how they are accepted, adopted, and implemented in practice. Particular attention is given to the role of key stakeholders—governments, private actors, and civil society—in negotiating and complying with standards, illustrated through empirical examples such as Global Value Chain and Sustainability Standards, EU climate governance, and the European Green Deal’s Fit for 55 package. Of special interest is how the EU employs standards as instruments of indirect governance to influence market behavior, steer investments, and institutionalize climate-related knowledge.
Organized by Charles Thiebaud
17:00 – 18:30 Keynote ‘Global standard setting in uncertain times – ‘small’ institutions as anchors of multilateralism’ (Eleni Tsingou, Copenhagen Business School)
Conference dinner at Restaurant Eintracht
Friday, 30 January 2026
9:00 – 10:30 Standards and the Digital Transformation
Digitalization is transforming almost all aspects of society: the way information and data are consumed, distributed and processed, and how and when communication takes place. One product of this social transformation is the emergence of digital platforms such as search engines, social media platforms and AI-Systems, that put increasing pressure not only on social cohesionas well as but also on the political sphere in democratic states. This panel will focus on the responses to these developments, as well as on the extent to which regulation and specific digital standards are used to shape this transformation process.
Organized by Lea Radke and Sebastian Jaschke
Coffee break
11:00 – 12:30 Standards, Infrastructure, and the Governance of Natural Ecosystems
In times of global markets, production and consumption networks, we witness ever increasing infrastructure expansion. All these developments are driven by standards in form of technical specifications of a product, process, service or system. These socio-technical systems interact and depend on ecosystems that can themselves be considered infrastructures. This panel will explore how different standards of ecosystem preservation and restoration define what we consider to be valuable ecological infrastrcture and how they influence social orders, among others access, benefit-sharing, property rights, including instances of resistance and contestation in these environments.
Organized by Julia Drubel
12:30 – 13:30 Catered Lunch break
13:30 – 15:00 Finding a Common Language? Past Trajectories & Future Avenues of Standardization Research
Current research on standards is highly dispersed and deeply grounded in complex empirics. Therefore, conceptual research avenues often take established theories and perspectives as starting point, such as science and technology studies or governance studies, among others. However, standards-specific frameworks and a common language of standardization research in social science are still underdeveloped. This panel traces the development of research on standards and asks to questions: firstly, why research on standards and/or standardization? And secondly, how has the subject developed over the last 15 years and is there (still) a need for a common research program?
Orangized by Lena Giggerl, David Hengsbach and Stefan Meyer
15:00 Closing Remarks and Goodbye
Conference registration
Venue Map
Adress
Goethe University Frankfurt
Campus Westend
Casino Building
Room: CAS 1801 Renate von Metzler Hall
