Alessa Hartmann is a Trade and Investment Policy Officer at PowerShift. She is one of the experienced voices of civil society trade policy in Germany and has been working on international trade and investment rules for many years.

Her work combines three key areas: First, it analyses sustainability chapters in trade agreements and asks whether social, environmental and human rights commitments are binding and verifiable. Secondly, it examines the interactions between trade policy and deregulation and questions to what extent trade policy regulations undermine environmental and climate standards and limit legislative room for manoeuvre.

A particular focus of her work is on whether sustainability in trade agreements is more than a memorandum of understanding – and what rules, procedures and control mechanisms are needed to make policy commitments effective in practice.