McGill Department of Political Science comparative ecolabel research project
From November 2019 to May 2020, I had the pleasure of working alongside Dr. Hamish van der Ven, a researcher in the Department of Political Science and cross appointed in the School of Environment, at McGill University. Dr. van der Ven’s research focuses on the role businesses and civil society groups play in global environmental governance, paying specific attention to the function of ecolabels.
Ecolabels are a visual cue found on goods and severices to indicate the adherence to specified standards and guidelines of different organizations - business, advocacy groups, NGOs, or governmental.
It was the goal of this specific research project to perform a comparative analysis of the approach various disciplines take in their engagement with global governance, in the form of ecolabels. The research project involved performing a literature review across selected disciplines (incl. Anthropology, Business Ethics, Bioengineering, to name a few) using a pre-selected search strategy. Research papers within these disciplines were then vetted according to a specified inclusion and exclusion criteria. Successful entries were categorized according to a unique cross-disciplinary grading system and core information pulled from each article in turn.
A total of 109 research papers across 8 disciplines were included.
(At this time, the research component of the project has concluded. The outcome is to be published in a book concerning comparative outlooks on Political Science topics.)