STEFAN RENCKENS

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. My work includes studies on the political economy of public interventions in transnational private governance; the impacts of private governance on public policy; the political-economic power of private audit firms in public and private sustainability governance; public-private governance interactions  in regime complexes; and the political-economic origins and development of transnational governance. To study these topics, I employ comparative case study research, social network analysis, and statistical 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. Most recently, I have also started exploring these topics in the context of artificial intelligence.

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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.

OP-ED ON GLOBAL STANDARDS AND CLIMATE CHANGE AWARENESS 

OP-ED ON AI AUDITS