Annika Frosch, originally from Germany, obtained academic experience in different countries, including France, Norway, and Italy, before coming to the EUI. Annika holds a Maîtrise in droit international et européen from Aix-Marseille University. During these first years at Aix-Marseille, an Erasmus year in Naples provided her with a first taste of life in Italy. In addition, her participation in Moot Court Competitions and her love for nature sparked an interest in environmental issues. This was further ignited during her LLM in Environment and Energy Law at the University of Oslo, where she developed a particular interest in ocean acidification. This interest led her to pursue a PhD, focusing on the governance of ocean acidification.
Her thesis, The Souring Seas. The Global Experimentalist Governance of Ocean Acidification?, is an interdisciplinary work that combines scientific research with legal and policy analysis. In her dissertation, Annika analyses how ocean acidification is and should be governed in light of the nature of the problem it presents. She finds that ocean acidification is a complex problem that can be scientifically explained. When mapping the current governance landscape for ocean acidification, it presents a regime complex. A governance framework that is a good match for ocean acidification as it can build on the current regime complex and cater to ocean acidification as a complex environmental problem is global experimentalist governance. Even though featured within the two case studies, the OA Alliance and the International Maritime Organization, it resembles global experimentalist governance, neither of the actors examined fully realises the ideal type of this governance theory. Although global experimentalist governance on paper is a good match for ocean acidification, in practice, issues remain when trying to implement the different features of the theory.
Annika's love for nature and the oceans inspired her to pursue an LLM in Environment and Energy Law and to write her Master’s thesis on ocean acidification. While writing her thesis, she realised it would be valuable to look beyond the legal texts and understand the larger governance landscape to tackle ocean acidification. Aside from her passion for law and policy, Annika is interested in natural sciences. Therefore, for her PhD thesis, she wanted to take an interdisciplinary approach and focus on finding governance solutions that can deal with the scientific reality of this complex problem.
Since December 2023, Annika has been working as a research fellow at the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy, and Resources at University College London (UCL). At UCL, Annika continues her focus on the oceans. Amongst other things, she works with governments and stakeholders active in the International Maritime Organization. In addition, she is working as a consultant for the OA Alliance at the United Nations Foundation. Both at UCL and at the OA Alliance, Annika is building on and expanding the knowledge she gathered while writing her PhD thesis. In the future, Annika would like to continue to work in an interdisciplinary manner, and contribute to academic literature with research that can feed into practice.