Research plan: taking the wheel again
In the last decade, mobility and logistics underwent system changes. The rise of platforms and social internet created the breeding place for a multiplicity of innovative business models such as e-commerce -triggering double-digit growth numbers for parcel delivery services-, sharing mobility and logistics, gig mobility and logistics and micro-mobility to name some. More than ever human kind became homo mobilis. Further disruptions are following soon, with unmanned transportation just across the doorstep.
These innovations, together with the associated efficiency gains, have the potential to provide an important contribution to the major societal challenges in transport and mobility, such as reducing external effects (greening transport, facilitating a modal shift), reducing exclusions (by providing access to mobility and logistics to all businesses and customers) and reducing exploitation of mobility and logistics workers (by providing them fair working conditions). However, such contribution cannot be automatically assumed. As market-driven innovations, these emerging business models prioritise profit maximisation instead of contribution to the aforementioned policy targets. Hence regulation is required to navigate mobilog innovations towards sustainable business models. Regulation has been unable to follow the pace of transformation within the industry. This led to regulatory lacunae in some fields and potentially unnecessary obstacles to innovation in others.
While businesses innovations provide unique opportunities to shape the transformation towards 03 mobilog, the absence of appropriate regulatory responses causes industry innovations to insufficiently contribute to key policy targets in mobility and logistics, notably greening transport, improving social standards of workers and enhancing access to mobility and logistics for individuals and businesses. When a regulatory response does take place, specific policy targets are often addressed through different dedicated policy measures and regulation. An integrated 03 approach is, however, lacking. Sometimes policy measures in one domain can even have opposite effects in other domains.
My research agenda aims to provide regulators and ecosystem actors the tools to take the wheel again in steering towards 03 mobility and logistics: 0 negative external effects, 0 exclusions and 0 exploitation. Underlying the 03 objective lie multiple further policy targets.
The research will contribute to the 03 mobilog by building legal designs for 03 mobilog-regulation and contracts. This will be conducted by using the legal design method that I applied in multiple ongoing projects. Essential to this aim is the ecosystem approach, that necessitates an integration of transport law, mobility law, labour law and consumer law next to general commercial contracts law. Further cooperation is required with other fields of legal expertise such as tax law, competition law and administrative law. Moreover, as a tool to transition, this research will always be embedded in the societal context. This is being garanteed through interdisciplinary cooperation with, for example, transport economics and social work.
Legal design conference
Call for Papers
Legal Ecosystems: Conceptualizing and Studying Law in Complex Environments
Conference – 12–14 October
About the Conference
Contemporary regulatory environments are increasingly characterized by complex constellations of interacting actors, institutions, and governance mechanisms. Law no longer operates solely through hierarchical state institutions and (two party) relationships between actors, but through multi-actor networks.
In several disciplines, such constellations are analyzed through the concept of ecosystems, which highlights interdependence, coordination, and co-evolution among actors. While ecosystem perspectives have become influential in fields such as innovation studies, management, and economic geography, they have only rarely been systematically integrated into legal scholarship.
This conference aims to explore how ecosystem thinking can advance legal research. It seeks to develop conceptual and methodological approaches for studying law within complex institutional environments, and to examine how law both shapes and is shaped by different types of ecosystems.
Bringing together legal scholars and interdisciplinary researchers, the conference aims to contribute to the development of a research agenda on legal ecosystems.
Conference Themes
The conference will explore 4 thematic areas
(i) Conceptualizing Legal Ecosystems, to explore the foundations of a legal ecosystem perspective through topics like defining legal ecosystems; ecosystem actors, institutions, and governance structures; ecosystem boundaries and legal infrastructures; interactions between public and private regulation; institutional complementarities and legal coordination; and the role of law in shaping ecosystem dynamics.
(ii) Methods for Studying Legal Ecosystems to explore new empirical and interdisciplinary approaches to studying law in complex governance systems through topics like empirical legal studies of ecosystems; stakeholder participation; network analysis of legal actors and institutions; mapping regulatory networks; mixed doctrinal–empirical approaches; interdisciplinary research designs; and data-driven approaches to legal ecosystems.
(iii) Cross-cutting Perspectives on Legal Ecosystems, which bring together conceptual and methodological approaches to examine how legal ecosystems can be designed, evaluated, and governed in practice, including questions of accessibility, inclusion, and system-level coordination
(iv) Sectoral ecosystems studies, such as platform and digital ecosystems (applying ecosystem perspectives to digitally mediated environments where platforms structure interactions, governance, and regulatory power); mobility ecosystems (examining how legal and governance dynamics unfold within increasingly integrated and data-driven mobility systems); logistics and supply chain ecosystems (analysing how law operates within interconnected logistics networks characterised by coordination across multiple actors); global value chain ecosystems and transnational regulation (examining legal coordination and fragmentation in global value chain ecosystems, corporate sustainability and the transformation of global value chain ecosystems, geopolitics, industry initiatives, and crisis governance in global value chain ecosystems) and work and labour ecosystems, including gig and platform work (exploring how labour relations are shaped within complex, multi-actor environments involving platforms and hybrid work arrangements);
Other sectoral ecosystems and approaches are also welcome.
Junior Scholars Workshop
There will be opportunity for a limited number of early-career researchers (PhDs and Postdocs) to participate in a pre-conference workshop dedicated to developing research projects on legal ecosystems as well as to strengthening the conceptual and methodological framing of ongoing research through an ecosystem perspective.
Participants will receive feedback from peers and senior scholars on the conceptual framing, research design, methodological approaches, and other aspects of their draft projects.
Submission Information
We welcome submissions in the form of extended abstracts (1,000–1,500 words). Submissions should clearly indicate how the paper contributes to the study of legal ecosystems and contain the name, affiliation(s), position, and email address of author(s).
Participants interested in the Junior Scholars Workshop should submit their research project of not more than 5 pages. The submission should include name, affiliation(s), position, and email address of author(s)
It is possible to participate both in the Junior Scholars Workshop and in the conference or in just either of them.
Important Dates
Submission deadline: June 8 Notification of acceptance: June 30
Conference: 12–14 October