Janina Grabs is Professor of Sustainability Research at the University of Basel since June 1, 2024, heads the subject area of Sustainability Research and is responsible for social science teaching in the Master's program in Sustainable Development. Previously, she worked as an assistant professor at ESADE Business School in Barcelona (2021-2024) and as a postdoc at ETH Zurich (2019-2021). She received her PhD in Political Science from the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster in 2018 (with research stays at Carleton University in Ottawa and Yale University in New Haven) with a dissertation on the effectiveness of private sustainability standards in the coffee sector based on field research in Colombia, Honduras and Costa Rica. Her dissertation was published as a monograph in 2020 by Cambridge University Press under the title “Selling Sustainability Short? The Private Governance of Labor and the Environment in the Coffee Sector", and has since won several awards (including the 2021 Organizations and the Natural Environment Book Award from the Academy of Management and the 2022 Lynton Keith Caldwell Award for the best book in the field of science, technology and environmental politics from the American Political Science Association). In addition to research and teaching, she is also involved in international professional associations such as the ECPR Standing Group on Regulatory Governance and the International Studies Association, and is book review editor of the journal Regulation & Governance.

Janina Grabs’ research focuses on the transnational governance of sustainability in global value chains and the options of states, firms, NGOs and other actors to improve the environmental and social sustainability of commodity production. She places a special emphasis on the sustainability governance of tropical agricultural commodities such as coffee, palm oil, and cocoa. Her work is interdisciplinary by nature and seeks to put political economy, regulatory governance, and business in society scholarship in conversation. The questions that fascinate her are the following: who defines and controls what sustainability means in the marketplace? What types of rule-making and enforcement mechanisms exist that govern these processes, and how effective are they in creating change? Do they set the right incentives for market actors, particularly those in the Global South, to adhere to them? Do they cause unintended consequences on smallholders’ market inclusion or livelihoods? As global production and consumption processes are threatening to erode our planet’s resources, what actions can states and non-state actors take to steer these processes into more amenable directions, and how do these actions work within the market framework?

Current third-party funded projects include investigating the implementation of zero-deforestation commitments in the palm oil sector, the role of traders as sustainability governance actors, and the paradoxes of climate-smart coffee production. She is furthermore starting a new research agenda on the implementation of due diligence legislation such as the EU Deforestation Regulation and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. She has published her research insights in leading peer-reviewed journals including Nature Sustainability, Regulation & Governance, the Journal of Business Ethics, Business Strategy and the Environment, New Political Economy, the Journal of Economic Geography, Ecological Economics, and the Journal of Environmental Management.