Josephine van Zeben

While responsible for nearly one‐third of global greenhouse gas emissions, food systems long remained peripheral to the legal and political architecture of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This article outlines the policy shifts that have led food systems to become increasingly central to the UNFCCC and its Conference of the Parties (COP) framework. We first examine how, from COP28 in Dubai to COP30 in Belém, food systems have emerged as a testing ground for integrating ecological integrity, social justice and climate governance. We then explore how recent COP‐related developments, including the UAE Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, the FAO Global Roadmap for Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG2) without Breaching the 1.5°C Threshold and the Alliance of Champions, have started to reshape the contours of international climate law by bringing food, land and biodiversity into core negotiation tracks. Nevertheless, these developments remain tentative: binding commitments are scarce, climate finance flows remain inequitable, and most Nationally Determined Contributions have so far tended to address food‐related emissions and vulnerabilities in a partial and uneven manner, rather than integrating them systematically. COP30 confirmed both the growing visibility and the persistent fragility of the food‐systems agenda within the UNFCCC. While the Belém outcomes consolidated some procedural progress, particularly on adaptation and human‐centred climate action, they stopped short of positioning food systems as a coherent and enforceable pillar of international climate governance.

Turkey’s Europeanization process provides a particularly interesting case study of the extra-jurisdictional impact of European Union (EU) law, both through policy convergence and through the so-called Brussels effect. Formally, Turkey must adopt certain EU rules due to its status as an EU candidate country, but its candidacy process has been lengthy and uncertain, resulting in partial and uneven adoption of EU rules. Nevertheless, EU-style policymaking has persisted in various policy areas, including environmental and climate policy. This paper aims to analyze the convergence of climate change policies between the EU and Turkey by employing multidimensional scaling, a method that enables the visualization and examination of the connectivity and intensity of cooperation between states. For the period from 2007 to 2023, our comparative analysis demonstrates that policy divergence occurs when the EU’s share of Turkey’s total trade decreases and when political challenges are experienced. On the other hand, periods of policy convergence coincide with periods of increased trade volume and expanded trade opportunities. The results suggest that through its market size and regulatory capacity, the EU exerts soft power which forces Turkey to align its climate policies with the EU to protect and maintain its competitiveness in the European marketplace.

As evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a growing reliance on smartphone apps such as digital contact tracing apps and vaccination passports to respond to and mitigate public health threats. In light of the European Commission's guidance, Member States typically offer such apps on a voluntary, ‘opt-in’ basis. In this paper, we question the extent to which the individual choice to use these apps – and similar future technologies – is indeed a voluntary one. By explicating ethical and legal considerations governing the choice situations surrounding the use of smartphone apps, specifically those related to the negative consequences that declining the use of these apps may have (e.g. loss of opportunities, social exclusion, stigma), we argue that the projected downsides of refusal may in effect limit the liberty to decline for certain subpopulations. To mitigate these concerns, we recommend three categories of approaches that may be employed by governments to safeguard voluntariness.

The sustainability of complex contractual governance in “hotbeds” depends on steering principles. Ostrom’s design principles provide an analytical framework for robust institutions that enable collective action and cooperative behaviour. The success of Ostrom’s design principles depends on the capacity of social entities to self-govern. This article explores the potential of Ostrom’s design principles as such steering principles for contractual governance in “hotbeds”. We find that the preconditions for successful contractual networks in “hotbeds” and the empirical situations underlying Ostrom’s design principles are comparable. Building on this comparability, we apply Ostrom’s design principles to contractual networks in “hotbeds” area theoretically, and then go on to demonstrate its applied value to three situations in West Papua, Indonesia.