Harri Kalimo

The economy and the environment are fundamental elements of sustainable Finnish, European and indeed global futures. The EU continues to strive towards a more competitive economy, while it at the same time faces enormous environmental challenges in many areas from resource use to biodiversity and climate change. Moreover, these environmental and economic challenges are tightly intertwined. The search for increasing global welfare needs to take place within the limited boundaries of the natural resources available today and for the generations to come. This challenge promises on the other hand also opportunities for those that are the most advanced in “greening their economies”.

These societal challenges and opportunities are at the core my professorship on the “circular economy” and the EU and international economic law. The societal objectives and the support for achieving them takes to a notable extent place in the laws and policies that govern the fast evolving environmental and economic sectors, and their interactions in Finland, the EU and beyond. The objective of my professorship is to deliver theoretically advanced, interdisciplinary and policy relevant research and education on this environment-economy nexus, focusing on the circular economy, sustainable trade agreements and green public procurement.

While pursuing this vision, I have engaged in the development of legal theories on e.g. the role of law in sustainability transitions, the notion of extended producer responsibility, ‘flexilateralism’ in EU trade policy, ‘market access’ in EU internal market law, as well as the interstate law heuristics of the EU and the USA. My  methodological contributions include  ‘comparative judicial discourse analysis’ as well as approaches to legal ‘coherence’ and the ‘softness’ of governance instruments. Empirically, my research has investigated e.g. the mechanisms of mediating environmental and economic considerations in law, the coherence between EU trade policy and the European Green Deal, the interactions between of data law and competition law, and of competition law with trade law. I frame my work through significant societal questions, such as waste electronics, electric vehicles, pirated content online and the sustainability of aviation fuels, usually in the context research projects funded by e.g. Academy of Finland, Strategic Research Council (STN), HorizonEurope, LIFE and ERASMUS+. My PhD in 2004 (‘e-Cycling’) was amongst the first broad legal analyses of what has become known as ‘the circular economy’.

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