I am an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department of the University of Toronto and the University of Toronto Scarborough. I'm also an Affiliated Faculty member of the Environmental Governance Lab, and a Research Fellow of the Earth System Governance project.
My research focuses on global environmental governance and political economy, with broad interests in transnational sustainability governance, the role of corporations in global governance, and public-private governance interactions, both internationally and comparatively. Specifically, my work includes studies on private rulemaking, compliance assurance in private governance and public policy, business power, corporate perceptions of sustainability and regulatory risks, lobbying, and interactions between transnational voluntary governance and public policy. To study these topics, I employ comparative case study research, statistical analysis, and social network analysis. My research covers multiple areas in environmental and sustainability governance, including fisheries, sustainable finance, climate change, fair trade, renewable energy, electronic waste, and organic agriculture. I have regional expertise in European Union politics and policy.
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NEW CHAPTER IN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT
Renckens, Stefan, and Graeme Auld. 2026. “Audits as Assurance in Contemporary Regulatory Governance ” in Maguire, Matthew and Graham K. Wilson (Eds.) Elgar Encyclopedia of Business and Government. https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/usd/elgar-encyclopedia-of-business-and-government-9781035307777.html
Since Michael Power (1997) famously noted the increasing use of audits from the 1980s onward, auditing has only become more prominent as a central feature of contemporary regulatory governance. Private actors such as business associations, companies and non-governmental organizations, in various constellations, use audits to offer market assurances of corporations’ responsible practises. Frequently, this assurance is achieved through participation in voluntary standard-setting programs focused on sustainability within global supply chains, an area of governance that has expanded drastically since Power’s initial writing. Increasingly, public regulatory processes are also outsourcing the verification of rules to auditors instead of using public agencies for this task. With scholars offering mixed opinions on these developments, we argue that auditors as political actors have been largely black-boxed and scholarly attention should turn to the political economy of auditing as an assurance process. Drawing from our expertise in sustainability governance, in this entry we contextualize auditing in regulatory governance and discuss the recent conceptualization of auditors as regulatory intermediaries. Following a discussion of contrasting perspectives on auditing, we outline an auditor-centered research agenda that addresses the variation in the composition and evolution of auditor markets, the impact of auditors’ interests and power on the regulation of these markets, and the supply side of auditor competence. This agenda offers new avenues to assess both the opportunities and challenges this model of governance presents.
NEW ARTICLE IN REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
Renckens, Stefan, and Christian Elliott. 2025. “Overlap and Fragmentation in the Global Governance Complex of Sustainable Finance.” Review of International Political Economy, 1-32. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2025.2596161
Global governance initiatives addressing sustainable finance, whether for advancing climate risk disclosure or defining green bond standards, have proliferated for over 20 years. Emblematic of a larger trend of broadening global governance complexity, a key question is whether these proliferating initiatives – developed by public and private actors alike – are producing a division of labor or a duplication of efforts. Moreover, if duplication is occurring, are public initiatives more likely to contribute as compared to private or public-private initiatives? Building on the regime complexity literature, we assess these questions with an original dataset of 111 Sustainable Finance Governance Initiatives (SFGIs) established between 2000 and 2020. We expand on existing measures of institutional overlap and fragmentation by developing an approach that focuses on an initiative’s ‘governance space’, defined by an SFGI’s issue area, governance function, actor target, and time of launch. We find that while there is significant duplication in sustainable finance, the governance landscape is more characterized by a division of labor between issues, functions, and targets. Moreover, we do not find that public initiatives contribute more to duplication than other initiatives. As such, our article offers theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of global governance and the international political economy of finance.
NEW ARTICLE IN NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY (Open Access)
Auld, Graeme and Stefan Renckens. 2025. "Rethinking Capacities of Regulatory Market-assurance Intermediaries: The Case of Seafood Sustainability Audits." New Political Economy, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2024.2446166
Credible assurances about the invisible qualities of goods and services – such as sustainability features – are key to market governance. The theory of regulatory intermediaries offers a lens for assessing diverse regulatory contexts where differently configured actors serve as market-assurance intermediaries between rule-makers and rule-targets. Studies using this theory have clarified the consequences of these configurations for regulatory capture, co-regulation, feedback effects, and the (re)production of knowledge and power. However, the distinction and relations between organisational and individual intermediaries remain under theorised. We reconceptualise the individual capacities of expertise and independence and assess these for 283 individuals performing 312 seafood sustainability audits for the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). Examining the individuals and teams performing these audits uncovers otherwise invisible biases within intermediary processes, including in assessors’ professional, educational and personal backgrounds, the composition of assessment teams and assessors’ experience in conducting MSC audits. The analysis highlights that intermediary capacities are co-determined by individual assessors and audit organisations and are only partly under the control of the MSC as regulator. A shift to an individual level of analysis thus elucidates new consequences for the legitimacy of the regulator and intermediaries and for the (re)production of power and inequities in global market governance.