Investments in assets related to positive environmental, social, and governance (ESG) have grown, attracting interest from both academics and investment fund practitioners. In this work, we explore various methods for integrating ESG factors into portfolio construction, assessing their feasibility. We address three key questions. First, what are potential benefits and challenges of incorporating ESG factors into portfolio strategies? We compare our results to an equally weighted benchmark to assess the impact of ESG integration on portfolio performance. Second, how does performance vary across different portfolio optimization techniques? By exploring various optimization approaches, we identify the most effective strategies for constructing climate-resilient portfolios. Finally, does performance differ across countries and/or regions? Our study focuses its analysis on North American (S&P 500 Top 50) and European Union (EU STOXX 50) markets. Through this investigation, we examine the portfolio integration of ESG factors and the impact of country/region-specific characteristics on climate portfolio performance. This study contributes by introducing an ensemble portfolio methodology to ESG integration and providing a comparative cross-regional analysis. Our findings show that the effectiveness of ESG integration depend on the portfolio optimization framework, the portfolio sustainability choice, and the underlying market. Although no single strategy dominates across all settings, the proposed ensemble approach provides the best performance by balancing sustainability objectives with diversification and risk-adjusted returns across regions.

This article undertakes a systematic analysis of environmental litigation at the Court of Justice of the European Union, focusing primarily on preliminary reference procedures initiated by civil society actors. It does so in order to provide a basis for future research that goes beyond individual case studies. Central take-aways are strong geographical disparities in cases brought by individuals and environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs), with many cases from Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands and very few cases from Spain, Greece and Portugal. Cases brought by individuals are equally numerous as cases brought by ENGOs, suggesting that ENGOs are not the only beneficiaries of the procedural innovations precipitated by the Aarhus Convention. Finally, companies are the most frequent litigants in environmental cases. Not all such cases challenge environmental obligations, but the significant number of cases that do, even where they are directed at individual decisions rather than policies, pose significant questions about the cumulative effects of such litigation.

In response to the accession of the postcommunist states from Central-Eastern Europe (CEE), as well as the subsequent rise of illiberal democracy in this region, the EU has developed mechanisms of supranational democratic defense. As a result, recent scholarship has started to recognize the EU as a supranational militant democracy. I agree that the EU has certain militant characteristics. However, I argue that the EU is actually promoting a historically specific regime developed in Western Europe after 1945, which is liberal first and democratic second. Focusing on the illiberal challenge from CEE, I add to the literature on the varieties of constitutionalism and constitutional tolerance in Europe by arguing that the EU should adopt a more procedural, less substantive definition of democracy that takes the lessons of communism seriously. Building on Seyla Benhabib’s cosmopolitanism, I argue that the EU can overcome this divide by adopting a more flexible, sociologically informed approach that takes memory and the claims of culture into account. While I recognize the dangers of illiberal democracy, I conclude that liberal democratic principles can best be defended by respecting the basic disagreements over the constitutional foundations of democracy that exist in Europe today.

The European Union (EU) is one of the world’s major donors of democracy assistance, which aims to foster democratisation. Its effects, however, depend on various conditional factors. This study explores the nexus between democracy assistance and administrative state capacity. Since democracy assistance seeks to strengthen—not substitute—the state and its institutions, we argue that administrative capacity is a crucial condition for the effectiveness of democracy assistance. To test our argument, we conduct a time-series cross-sectional analysis covering EU democracy assistance allocation from 2007 to 2021 across 23 countries in the EU’s neighbourhood. Our results indicate that assistance allocated to countries with higher state capacity has a more substantial effect on their levels of democracy than assistance allocated to countries with lower state capacity. With that, we address an important research gap and contribute to policy debates on the allocation of democracy assistance.

We analyse the process that led to the most comprehensive reform of preventive economic surveillance in the European Union (EU) since 1997. Following a Lasswellian framework, after outlining the fiscal context, the policy context, and the pending policy problems, we investigate the disagreements that emerged during the negotiations and the factors that shaped policymakers’ positions and the outcome. The policy was beset by unobservable and inconsistent indicators, non-compliance, procyclical national fiscal policies, and poor quality of public finances. The reform was centred on a single performance indicator, a longer time frame, and strengthened independent institutions. Amidst pandemic and war, the negotiations focused on three key issues: national flexibility, such as safeguards and exemptions, balance of power between EU institutions, and the role of independent institutions. The status of public finances, the ideological orientation of governments, inter-institutional conflict, and the upcoming elections go a long way in explaining alignments and voting behaviour. The final design approximated the view of the coalition of governments that could block the reform and were less concerned about failure. We conclude by contextualising this reform within the previous ones. Old problems may resurface, but in a new guise.

Public participation in artificial intelligence (AI) development by public administrations is increasingly proposed as a potential silver bullet for mitigating the risks associated with the use of AI in the public sector. This paper examines whether public participation can serve as a viable solution from a doctrinal and practical perspective by analyzing the availability of legal avenues for natural and legal persons to participate in AI development procedures by the EU and member states’ public entities. While the idea is appealing, there are significant obstacles. Notably, EU law currently lacks specific legal frameworks to enable public involvement in the design and development of AI systems by public entities. Neither traditional European administrative law nor the new Artificial Intelligence Act provides effective legal avenues for involving the broader public in AI development in the public sector, posing challenges to implementing meaningful participation. Furthermore, drawing an analogy from environmental law, where public participation often ends up being formalistic and ineffective, suggests that similar outcomes might arise in the context of Public-Sector AI development. Therefore, despite the theoretical advantages of involving the public, this paper argues that, without robust legal structures and meaningful procedural designs, public participation in Public-Sector AI development may ultimately fall short of achieving its promises, proving to be a dead end.

This article introduces the MigFund dataset, a comprehensive resource that traces the European Union’s financial commitments to migration and asylum from 2000 to 2023. Developed in response to long-standing calls to ‘follow the money’ in EU migration governance, the dataset records over 1,700 funding measures across internal and external programmes, disaggregated by sub-policy area, target group, geographic scope, and degree of restrictiveness. Drawing on the literature on policy tools, the article conceptualises EU funding as an expression of institutional preferences, bureaucratic negotiation and strategic framing, shaping and shaped by evolving policy priorities. A key contribution of the dataset is its coding of each measure along a restrictive-to-open continuum, enabling researchers to assess how EU financial tools promote either mobility and protection or containment and control. The article details the dataset’s structure and coding logic and presents key descriptive findings on the evolution of EU funding, showing a steady expansion of resources and increasing complexity in the programming landscape. Through this empirical lens, the article invites a reconsideration of financial instruments as autonomous policy tools, capable of reinforcing, offsetting or reconfiguring broader migration policy logics. MigFund thus provides a basis for macro- and meso-level analyses of funds in EU studies, migration studies and public policy more broadly.

Do geopolitical considerations affect European citizens’ attitudes toward incoming Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)? This article draws on existing literature to derive hypotheses about the geopolitical drivers of citizens’ opposition to FDI. We test these hypotheses with a conjoint experiment embedded in a survey fielded in the EU’s three largest economies: France, Germany, and Italy (N ≈ 4,500). Our micro-foundational evidence shows that three factors consistently shape opposition to inward FDI across all three countries: (1) concerns about relative gains—citizens are more likely to oppose investments that benefit the sending country more than their own; (2) military alliance status—citizens are less likely to oppose FDI from security allies; and (3) EU membership—citizens are significantly less opposed to investments from other EU Member States. Contrary to prior expectations, we find no evidence of a consistent “China effect.” Overall, the findings suggest that the EU’s recent shift toward a more geopolitical approach to investment screening broadly aligns with the preferences of its public.

In recent years, the rapid development of artificial intelligence has raised a series of ethical issues. How to balance AI innovation and AI governance has attracted wide attention from society. Some principle-based and practical approaches have already emerged. However, these strategies mainly face problems of time, speed, and cost. They fail to fundamentally balance dynamic factors and the need for explainability. This study proposes an explainable and adaptive AI governance approach from the perspective of time to balance AI governance and AI innovation. Causal models have causal explanation capabilities. They meet the requirements of responsible innovation. They can improve governance speed and reduce governance and innovation costs. Taking Bayesian networks as an example, they have explainability and dynamic adaptation ability. Bayesian networks can be used as a governance step before a regulatory sandbox. Bayesian networks can implement a human-assisted regulatory approach. This approach can combine the EU Artificial Intelligence Act with scholars’ recommendations on quantifiable risk levels. The explainable and adaptive AI governance approach has three important meanings for AI governance. First, it can provide an inclusive governance path. Second, it can supplement static governance strategies. Third, it can automatically generate explainable value alignment schemes.

Judicial review allows courts to serve as a powerful check on policymakers. Nonetheless, courts face the possibility of the legislature overriding unwanted decisions when adjudicating cases in which legislators have an interest. I argue that this threat heightens when courts’ decisions affect legislative agenda-setters that can prioritize bills favoring override, prompting courts to act strategically in response. Leveraging exogenous variation in agenda-setting power from the six-month rotating terms of the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, I provide evidence that the Court of Justice of the European Union strategically delays deciding a case when the member state holding the Presidency expresses interest in the case’s outcome. A difference-in-differences design demonstrates that this effect disappears with the introduction of the Trio Presidency in 2007, which reduced each individual Presidency’s agenda-setting power.

The term data sovereignty—the principle that data is subject to the laws and governance of the country where it is collected or stored—faces implementation challenges. The legal deadlock over how to regulate transatlantic (E.U.–U.S.) data transfers reveal the difficulties of asserting “sovereignty” over data, a resource that flows transnationally through digital technologies. Among global regulatory efforts, the European Union’s struggle to ensure the supremacy of its data protection and privacy laws represents an interesting case from which to derive new theoretical and conceptual insights. This paper advances data agency—as agency mediated by data, not over it. The intention is to advance a term that moves beyond the limits of data sovereignty to explain how governance over data-driven systems is distributed and contested. The manuscript suggests pragmatic pathways for more effective governance as mere “control” over data is not enough to achieve meaningful insights derived from data technologies.

Maritime security in the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) has become a shared concern for the European Union (EU) and India, yet sustained co-presence and overlapping security challenges have not translated into deeper institutional convergence. Drawing on institutional choice theory, this article examines how and why the EU and India select different institutional formats for multilateral maritime security cooperation. Employing an analytical framework that distinguishes between formal intergovernmental organisations, informal intergovernmental organisations, trans-governmental networks, and ad hoc coalitions, the study combines semi-structured interviews with EU and Indian officials and document analysis. The findings show that while both actors operate across the formal–informal spectrum, their institutional choices are shaped by distinct cost sensitivities and strategic priorities: the EU remains anchored in treaty-based multilateralism while pragmatically complementing it with informal mechanisms, whereas India relies more heavily on initiator-driven and sovereignty-preserving informal arrangements. These patterns help explain why institutional choices in the WIO have produced parallel institutional pathways rather than convergence, with implications for debates on institutional choice, informal governance, and the constraints on multilateral security cooperation.

Recent research has demonstrated the entanglements between the security of Self and IR, yet it remains unclear how ontological security of the IR Self can be created. I argue that ontological security can be attempted through expressivist practices. Informed by perspectives from arts, law, and philosophy, I develop an analytical framework to explain how expressivism relates to ontological security. The implications of this framework for ontological security theory are that it proposes to re-define ontological security as a process of becoming secure, helping to understand how ontological security is expressively asserted. The empirical attainment of the nexus between expressivist practices and ontological security is illustrated by a case study of EU counter-measures adopted after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This article makes a twofold contribution. First, it provides a new theoretical distinction, applying expressivism to illuminate how ontological security can be creatively begot, moving beyond the long-standing dichotomy in the ontological security literature of being secure or insecure, and focusing instead on the actuation of becoming secure. Second, it illustrates various expressivist practices, showing how the EU transcended from a civilian power to becoming a global security and emerging criminal justice actor.

This paper investigates how European Union institutional sources influence public support for carbon taxes through messenger effects. Our framework predicts that support decreases with higher tax rates, an effect moderated by respondents’ associations with the source, namely trust, euroscepticism, and national identity. We run a pre-registered survey-embedded vignette experiment in Germany and Poland (N = 3192), in which respondents evaluate carbon tax policies for car, aviation, and heating fuels. Proposals vary in tax rate (10%, 50%, 100%) and supporting source (European Commission, national government, foreign government). We find that higher tax rates decrease support and that source-specific effects are driven by trust, but not by national identity or euroscepticism, which instead structure baseline support across all actors. Moreover, positive messenger cues do not moderate the negative effect of costs. These findings show that institutional attitudes matter for carbon tax support, but that policy costs remain central.

This article presents the AI Ethics Canvas: a graphical tool to guide public administrations in mainstreaming ethics in the development, deployment, and monitoring of artificial intelligence (AI) tools for their own everyday use. Our canvas is the result of an action-research effort conducted within the scope of a project involving the Autonomous Province of Trento (PAT), Italy. We initially developed it based on existing ethical and legal frameworks. Then, we conducted qualitative interviews with PAT functionaries and technologists developing software on behalf of the PAT to ensure the canvas’s content was clear and applicable to public administration work. While originally elaborated for the PAT, the canvas presented is applicable to all public administrations within the European Union who wish to adopt AI in their operations, as it references to core European legislation such as General Data Protection Regulation, AI Act, Data Act, and Data Governance Act. The article presents the AI Ethics Canvas both as a final product and in its creation process to enhance transparency in AI ethics tool development.