Johanna Coenen joined the research group as a PhD researcher in September 2018. She received a bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences from University College Maastricht and a master’s degree in Political Science with a specialisation in Global Environmental Governance from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Johanna spent an exchange semester at Queen’s University in Canada. She holds a doctoral degree (Dr. rer. pol.) from Leuphana University. After defending her thesis, Johanna worked as a postdoctoral guest researcher at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg for six months and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Stockholm University.

Johanna’s research focuses on governance institutions for sustainability in globally telecoupled systems in the context of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and global commodity chains. Her main research interest concerns how to govern the environmental impacts of long-distance interactions between social-ecological systems.

Johanna has been an Early-Stage Researcher in the EU-funded H2020 Marie Curie Innovative Training Network: COUPLED – Operationalising telecouplings for solving sustainability challenges related to land use (2018-2022). She spent a one-month research stay at UCLouvain in Belgium. 

Johanna is a member of the Global Land Programme (GLP) and a co-coordinator of the Working Group “Telecoupling Research Towards Sustainable Transformation of Land Systems” within the GLP. She is also a research fellow of the Earth System Governance Project and a member of the Swedish Forest, Climate, and Livelihood research network (FOCALI).

Visit Johanna’s profile at leuphana.de | ResearchGate | LinkedIn | Google Scholar | ORCID

Publications 

2023

Coenen, J. (2023). Environmental governance beyond borders: Governing telecoupled systems towards sustainability [Doctoral thesis, Leuphana University Lüneburg]. https://pub-data.leuphana.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/1344

Coenen, J., Sonderegger, G., Newig, J., Meyfroidt, P., Challies, E., Bager, S., Busck-Lumholt, L. M., Corbera, E., Friis, C., Frohn Pedersen, A., Laroche, P. C. S. J., Parra Paitan, C., Qin, S., Roux, N., & Zaehringer, J. G. (2023). Toward spatial fit in the governance of global commodity flows. Ecology and Society, 28(2). 24. [free open access content]

2022

Busck-Lumholt, L.M., Coenen, J., Persson, J., Frohn Pedersen, A., Mertz, O. & Corbera, E. (2022). Telecoupling as a framework to support a more nuanced understanding of causality in land system science. Journal of Land Use Science. 17(1). 386-406. 

Cotta, B., Coenen, J., Challies, E., Newig, J., Lenschow, A., & Schilling-Vacaflor, A. (2022). Environmental governance in globally telecoupled systems: Mapping the terrain towards an integrated research agenda. Earth System Governance, 13, 100142 [free open access content].

Coenen, J., Newig, J., Meyfroidt, P. (2022). Environmental governance of a Belt and Road project in Montenegro – National agency and external influences. Land Use Policy, 119, 106136.

Coenen, J., Glass, L.M., Sanderink, L. (2022). Two degrees and the SDGs: a network analysis of the interlinkages between transnational climate actions and the Sustainable Development Goals. Sustainability Science. 17(4). 1489-1510.

2021

Coenen, J., Bager, S., Meyfroidt, P., Newig, J., & Challies, E. (2021). Environmental Governance of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Environmental Policy and Governance, 31(1), 3-17. https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.1901

Grey literature

Coenen, J., (2023). Rejsen er lang på vejen mod en ny, grøn Silkevej. Geografisk Orientering (04/2023). 14-21.

Bager, S., Coenen, J., Nielsen, J.Ø., Trommler, K., & Haberl, H. (2021). Governing Land Use Beyond Borders. COUPLED White Paper. Berlin, Germany: COUPLED. 

Blog posts

The telecoupled implications of the new EU Regulation on deforestation-free products (EUDR) (November 2023)

Spatial mismatches impede the effective governance of global commodity flows (June 2023)

Five challenges of leading a co-authored paper and how to overcome them (August 2022)

The Journal of Cleaner Production tolerates plagiarism (March 2022)

Online visualization tools to communicate research results (April 2021)

Building a green Belt and Road Initiative? First steps on a long road ahead. (August 2020)

Responsible travel in sustainability science: How to overcome our dilemma of studying global connections and the urge to travel less (March 2020)

10 tips for future PhD students: What I have learned in my first year (October 2019)