Laila Berning

Laila Berning is a global environmental policy and governance scholar with fieldwork and research experience across Europe, Indonesia, Brazil and Costa Rica. As part of her postdoctoral research at the Beijer Institute within the CAPS project, she analyses sustainability transformations in transnational food systems, with a particular focus on behavioural changes among corporate actors.

During her PhD research, she focused on global supply chain regulatory governance in the forest and agricultural sectors. She worked in different international multi-partner research projects funded by the UK Government‘s FGMC programme and the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia in Berlin (Germany), the European Union Horizon Europe Research and Innovation programme, as well as the ERASMUS+ Programme, co-funded by the European Union.

Her work has been published in leading journals such as Sustainable Development, Regulation & Governance, Forest Policy and Economics, and Nature Ecology & Evolution.

She has lectured on deforestation-free supply chain governance, environmental policy analysis and sustainable entrepreneurship at the University of Freiburg, the University of Padua, the Free University of Berlin, and the University of British Columbia.

Her previous work as a social impact entrepreneur has received international recognition; awards include being a 2019 UN Young Champion of the Earth Finalist, a 2018 UN Hult Prize Global Finalist, and a recipient of the 2019 ‘Top 3 Next Economy Award’ from the German Sustainability Award Foundation.

Laila holds a PhD in Forest and Environmental Policy, an MSc in Environmental Governance, and a BSc in Environmental Sciences from the University of Freiburg. She also studied environmental engineering at the Polytechnic University of Madrid in Spain.