Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Netherlands
fellow
Philip Schleifer
2025-2026
Home institution
University of Amsterdam
Country of origin (home institution)
Netherlands
Discipline(s)
Political Sciences
Social Sciences
Theme(s)
Agriculture & Food
Artificial Intelligence
Environment, Sustainability & Biodiversity
Labor, Capital & Innovation
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Philip Schleifer is Associate Professor of Transnational Governance at the University of Amsterdam. His research sits at the intersection of global environmental politics and international political economy, with a particular focus on how business and sustainability are governed in the global economy.
Before joining the UvA, Philip was a Max Weber Fellow and a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He has held visiting positions at Duke University and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics.
Philip’s research agenda explores how public and private actors shape sustainability in the global economy. His past projects investigated the effectiveness and transparency of private sustainability standards in global supply chains, the design of hybrid biofuel governance in the European Union, and the political economy of natural resource governance in emerging economies. His most recent work integrates AI-assisted text analysis to examine how transnational corporations respond to the global biodiversity crisis. He also co-hosts the AI & Environmental Politics Network, a growing community of scholars currently organized through a listserv that convenes events on both the role of artificial intelligence in environmental governance and the use of AI as a research method in environmental politics.
His research has been supported by various funding bodies, including EU COST, the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research, the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies, and the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
Philip’s work has been published in leading academic outlets such as Review of International Political Economy, Regulation & Governance, Global Environmental Politics, Governance, Global Food Security, and Ecological Economics. His book, Global Shifts: Business, Politics, and Deforestation in a Changing World Economy, was published by MIT Press in 2023.
Affiliations and Networks
Philip is a member of the UvA Political Economy and Transnational Governance (PETGOV) program group, an associate of the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES), and a research affiliate of both the UvA Climate Initiative (SEVEN) and the UvA Sustainability Platform (USP). He is also a fellow of the Earth System Governance Project (ESG) (Taskforce on the Governance of Nature and Biodiversity), a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the United Nations Forum on Sustainability Standards (AAC-UNFSS), and an associate of the Research Network Sustainable Global Supply Chains.
Advisory and Policy Work
In addition to his academic research, Philip regularly engages in advisory and policy work for international organizations, civil society groups, and national governments. He has worked with the International Trade Centre, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the United Nations Forum on Sustainability Standards, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, and the Dutch Government, among others.
Research Project
Business and the Nature Crisis: Analysing Corporate Discourse with Large Language Models
Research question: How do powerful corporations in the agrifood, construction, and mining sectors frame nature and biodiversity in their sustainability strategies?
Philip Schleifer’s project uses large language models (LLMs) to explore how major companies are responding to the global biodiversity crisis. Since the 1970s, wildlife populations have declined by nearly 70%, and large multinational corporations—particularly in the agrifood, mining, and construction sectors—have had an outsized impact on nature.
The project creates a new dataset and uses LLMs to investigate how some of the world’s most influential companies frame their environmental policies. For instance, it looks at whether these corporations take into account ecological, economic, socio-cultural, and intrinsic values in their biodiversity strategies.
By using LLMs as “research assistants”, Schleifer is tapping into a powerful new method for analysing large volumes of text—one that is quickly changing how social scientists work. Because this approach is still emerging, the project also tackles key challenges around research design (such as how prompts are written and how reliable the results are), ethical concerns (like bias and transparency), and legal issues (including privacy and data use).
Research Interests:
Corporate biodiversity strategies; large language models in social science; environmental framing by corporations; computational text analysis; AI-assisted research methods