Rike Kraemer

is a research associate at the Collaborative Research Center 597 “Transformations of the State” at the University of Bremen. She is member of its research project “Political Autonomy in the EU Multi-level Legal System.” She received her First and Second State Exam in Bremen and has been trained in Germany and in the Netherlands. She has taught courses in law as well as in political science at the University of Bremen. She has actively advised environmental NGOs and other groups on issues of WTO and EU law. In addition, between 2009 and 2011 she has been one of the equal opportunity officers of the research center “Transformations of the State.”

Her research interests fall broadly in the field of international and European economic law and governance, environmental law in general as well as constitutional law. Her current work focuses on the coordination of environmental policy goals in trade law, especially in the field of procurement and subsidy law.

Research Project

Diagonal Conflicts in WTO, EU and U.S. Procurement and Subsidy Law

The shift of trade agreements towards national regulatory issues has contributed to the rising relevance of diagonal conflicts. These kind of conflicts between different policy goals pursued at different levels of governance have been extensively discussed in the "trade and" literature. Yet, the existing scholarly debate has focussed on the implications of trade and goods, while largely neglecting the liberalization of subsidies and procurement regimes; however, lately these fields of law have become more important as instruments of environmental policy. Instead of command-and-control instruments, incentive-based or market-based regulations are gaining importance in environmental policy today. Both procurement and subsidy law are market-based regulations with a strong potential to enhance environmental protection. The research addresses the question, how conflicts between economic and environmental policy goals have been solved, prevented, or otherwise dealt with in federal-type political systems, such as the EU and the United States, comparing the findings with the WTO level.