Eva Thomann is a full professor of Public Administration at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. Her research focuses on policy implementation, street-level bureaucracy, public accountability, and set-theoretic methodology.

Eva Thomann, Explaining Divergence of Street-Level Intermediaries: The Accountability Regimes Framework, Wednesday, March 4^th 2026, 14.00 CET; 13.00 London Time; 15.00 Jerusalem Time.

Regulatory Intermediary Theory (RIT) maps how intermediaries, who are given responsibility but often lack hierarchical accountability to regulators, have multiple roles in the process of regulatory compliance. But beyond acknowledging the importance of complex actor relations, the RIT lacks a clear theory of how these relationships may affect the realization of regulatory intentions during policy implementation. This lecture introduces the Accountability Regimes Framework (ARF) to model the multiple formal and informal roles of intermediaries, identify accountability dilemmas, and theorize the conditions under which they trigger intermediary non-compliance.

In increasingly hybrid governance settings, street-level bureaucrats often act as regulatory intermediaries. Street-level intermediaries are crucial actors for delivering regulation, who often diverge from formal policies in practice. Moreover, next to their role as policy implementers, they are embedded in a complex web of social roles and relationships with peers, clients, employers, and other citizens. The accountability regimes framework models this complexity and helps scholars explain how conflicting accountabilities, in the form of accountability dilemmas, affect divergence. This lecture presents the ARF and illustrates it empirically based on the case of the Prevent Duty in the United Kingdom (UK). In this politicized policy environment, the ARF models how street-level intermediaries become informal policymakers when rules clash with their roles as professionals, citizen-agents, or “political animals.” Three testable propositions are presented for future research on how street-level accountabilities and dilemmas influence the actual behaviour of street-level bureaucrats. The lecture presents supportive empirical evidence from a multi-method project involving in-depth qualitative confidential interviews on real-life PD cases (N=19) analyzed through crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, as well as a standardized, anonymous online survey experiment with UK social science lecturers (N=809).

Axel Marx and Charline Depoorter, Greenwashing and Trust Repair via Intermediation: The Case of ESG Rating Providers in Sustainable Finance, Thursday, January 16^th 2025. 14.00 CET; 13.00 London Time; 15.00 Jerusalem Time; 8.00 Eastern Time.

In this webinar, we briefly introduce the intermediaries approach, focusing on different roles intermediaries can play in regulatory governance. We then illustrate how this approach is applied in ongoing research and a recent project proposal. The ongoing research focuses on Voluntary Sustainability Standards (eco-certification/private governance) and aims to identify how standard-setting organizations implement their standards and the crucial role of intermediaries therein. The project proposal examines the emergence of new regulations based on (human rights/sustainability) due diligence, which formulate specific obligations for (large) firms. This proposal starts from the premise that various intermediaries are involved in operationalizing due diligence.

Axel Marx is Deputy Director of the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies (KU Leuven) and an expert in sustainability standards, global governance, and EU trade policy. He chairs the Academic Advisory Council of the UN Forum on Sustainability Standards and serves on multiple international committees, including the ILO Labour Provisions in Trade Agreements Hub steering committee. He developed a free EdX MOOC on Sustainable Trade and sustainability certification: https://www.edx.org/course/sustainable-trade.
Charline Depoorter is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Basel’s Sustainability Research Group, focusing on sustainable supply chains due diligence and trade-based sustainability instruments in tropical agri-food systems. She is a Research Fellow at the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies and Academic Coordinator of the UN Forum on Sustainability Standards’ Academic Advisory Council. She co-developed KU Leuven’s MOOCs on Sustainable Trade and UN Sustainable Development Goals, and previously served as Associate Economic Affairs Officer at UNCTAD.

Agnieszka Smoleńska and David Levi-Faur, Greenwashing and Trust Repair via Intermediation: The Case of ESG Rating Providers in Sustainable Finance, Thursday, November 14^th 2024.

Decentralised governance and self-regulation in sustainability transition relies on trust between actors. However, pervasive scandals and concerns about greenwashing suggest distrust. Governance strategies to repair and build trust via intermediaries provide some solution to the trust problem. This paper investigates the different institutional strategies to repair and build trust via ESG rating providers as regulatory intermediaries, in sustainable finance. Analysing the development of regulatory regimes around ESG rating, we raise two questions: First, what were the political dynamics around the adoption of ESG ratings provider rules in the EU and UK?Second, what are the differences between the trust-building and repair strategies deployed by the EU and the UK rule-makers?

Agnieszka Smoleńska is a She’s Part-Time Assistant Professor with the Florence School of Banking and Finance (EUI) and Institute of Law Studies (Polish Academy of Sciences) and a Senior Policy Fellow at the London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Transition Expertise (CETEx)
David Levi-Faur is a Professor at the Department of Political Science and the Federmann School of Public Policy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Wolfson Family Chair in Public Administration.