BCCN wins Funding from the European Research Council Consolidator Grant

The European Research Council (ERC) has selected Prof Dr Sarah Eaton for this year's Consolidator Grant. The Professor of Transregional China Studies at the Department of East Asian Studies, Humboldt University, and her research team will receive almost two million euros for the TECHtonics project.

For the TECHtonics project, Sarah Eaton is investigating the three "emerging powers" China, India and Kenya and their activities in the field of global technical standard-setting in a theoretically innovative and empirically rich way. The project will contribute to theory building in the disciplines of International Relations and International Political Economy and specifically in the research field of the dynamics of power transitions between established and rising powers.

One aim of the project is to develop a theoretical framework for investigating how and why some developing countries manage to gain power in the field of global standardisation against all odds. A second objective is to develop a new concept ("governance rupture") to examine the multiple forms of contestation in international technical standardisation.As the issues of institutionalised inequality and complex governance challenges are relevant not only to technical standard setting but also to other global policy fields, the results will advance theorising on power, politics and contestation in the global governance literature.