Daniel Bertram is a socio-legal scholar working across law, science and technology studies, and political sociology to understand how we govern the natural environment. As a post-doctoral researcher at the Van Vollenhoven Institute, Daniel’s work is situated in the ERC-funded DigiFood project, which analyses how different forms of data governance in the food and agriculture sector affect power dynamics and configure the future of food. 

In the context of Daniel’s PhD research at the European University Institute, he examined how the idea of criminalising “ecocide” has emerged over the past decade and how it has been translated into a variety of institutional formats. Building on desk research, archival sources, interviews, and participant observation, his thesis retraces why and how different actors imagine ecocide as an adequate response to socio-environmental grievances, and how these imaginaries configure the space for legal and political contestation of the Anthropocene more broadly. Preliminary results have been published in the Journal of Environmental Law,  Journal of International Criminal Justice, Qualitative and Multi-Method Research and blogs such as EJIL:Talk!, Verfassungsblog, and Opinio Juris.

Previous research has focused on the legal principle of intergenerational equity in climate litigation, the governance landscape of environmental and human rights due diligence, and the prospects and pitfalls of transnational environmental lawsuits, among others, and has been published in Transnational Environmental Law, German Law Journal, and Global Environmental Politics.

Supported by a scholarship from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Daniel studied Global Law (LLB) and Public Governance (BSc) at Tilburg University and Law (MPhil) at the University of Oxford. During his PhD studies, he completed research visits at the University of Trento, the Scuola Normale Superiore, the University of California at Los Angeles, the Colegio de México, and the Rachel Carson Center at LMU Munich.

Next to his academic engagements, he regularly follow and report from multilateral environmental negotiations as a writer for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin.