Congratulations to Simon Happersberger for winning the Oran R. Young Prize for the best early-career paper at the TC/ESG 2025 Conference!
His award-winning paper titled From coherence to embeddedness? Environmental change in the EU’s bilateral trade policy since the European Green Deal was written together with Simon’s PhD supervisor Professor Harri Kalimo, and research assistant Mertcan Topbasoglu.
Simon Happersberger is a PhD Fellow at the VUB Brussels School of Governance and at United Nations University, Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS). His research focuses on the comparative effectiveness of EU policy instruments fostering sustainable trade. Simon concluded his studies in Goettingen, Paris, Berlin and Cape Town with a M.A. in Political Science.
His paper seeks to examine the extent to which the European Union’s bilateral trade agreements have become greener since the introduction of the European Green Deal. According to the Prize Committee, the paper provides a theoretically informed framework for being able to assess the EU’s bilateral trade agreements through five ideal types: trade purism, economic exceptions, trade-environment coherence, environmental embeddedness, and environmental integrity. This framework not only provides the means for analyzing the policy discourse, trade instruments, and policy implementation of the EU’s bilateral trade agreements, but is also highly replicable across other areas of environmental policy. Using a two dimension congruence analysis of primary documents, the authors provide an empirically rich account of what the EU ‘thinks, says, and does.’
For winning the 2025 Oran R. Young Prize, Simon Happersberger will receive a presentation plaque and a book-voucher from The MIT Press worth 250 USD.
The 2025 Prize Committee consists of:
- Professor Katherine Rietig, Newcastle University (Chair)
- Professor Frederick Ato Armah, University of Cape Coast
- Professor Idil Boran, York University
- Professor Susan Park, University of Sydney
- Dr. Yixian Sun, University of Bath
The Oran R. Young Prize awarded by the Earth System Governance Project seeks to reward and encourage cutting-edge research on earth system governance by early-career scholars who could become the next generation of leading scholars in the field of environmental governance research – a field shaped and significantly influenced by the pioneering work of Prof. Oran R. Young. Read more about the Prize here.
