Harri Kalimo
About
Harri Kalimo is a professor, Jean Monnet Chair and the Co-Director of the 3E (Environment, Economy and Energy) Research Centre at the Brussels School of Governance. He also holds a professorship at the University of Eastern Finland (UEF) Law School, forming a part of the Sustainability Law research group. As an educator and researcher, Harri has been pioneering various areas of European and international environmental and economic law. His focus is on developing theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches at the nexus between environmental and economic law, aiming to support sustainability transitions in an era of the triple planetary crisis, increasing economic competition and intensifying geopolitical tensions. Harri’s work at the environment-economy nexus covers fields such as the circular economy, sustainable trade and green public procurement. He has engaged in the development of theories on e.g. the role of law in sustainability transitions, the notion of extended producer responsibility, ‘flexilateralism’ in EU trade policy, ‘market access’ in EU internal market law, as well as the interstate law heuristics of the EU and the USA. His methodological contributions have contributed to e.g. ‘comparative judicial discourse analysis’ as well as approaches to legal ‘coherence’ and the ‘softness’ of governance instruments. Empirically, Harri has investigated e.g. the mechanisms of mediating environmental and economic considerations in law, the coherence between EU trade policy and the European Green Deal, the interactions between of data law and competition law, and of competition law with trade law. Harri frames his work through significant societal questions such as waste electronics, electric vehicles, pirated content online and the sustainability of aviation fuels. Harri’s PhD 2004 (‘e-Cycling’) was amongst the first broad legal analyses of what has become known as ‘the circular economy’. Harri is trained as a lawyer (LL.D; LL.M) and an economist (M.Sc. Econ & BA) and teaches annually six courses in environmental and economic law: two in the post-graduate programme LLM in International and European Law (”PILC”) and two in the M.Sc. in European Governance (EuroMaster) at the Brussels School of Governance; one at the UEF (the internationally novel course on the “Circular Economy Law” since 2018) and one at Tampere University (EU law). Harri’s objective as an educator is to offer inspirational teaching that is theory-grounded, practically topical, pedagogically innovative and genuinely interdisciplinary. Before his academic career, Harri held managerial and expert positions in the marketing, governmental relations and legal teams at Nokia Corporation.