New member of the TAXLAW-team
The TAXLAW team welcomes a new member, Jakob Laage-Thomsen, who has received a Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship grant for his project, JUSTCARBON (Just Carbon Transitions). Jakob started his two-year project in February 2024.
Head of the TAXLAW-team, Marte Mangset, is Jakob’s supervisor. Like her, Jakob will be working from the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo. Additionally, assistant Professor Johan Christensen, at the Institute of Public Administration (IPA), Leiden University, will also supervise the project.
Jakob’s project investigates contemporary policy processes around expansions of carbon tax systems and their implementation in national legal jurisdictions, and its effects on the professional organization of legal expertise.
As carbon taxes (taxes on Greenhouse Gas Emissions [GhGe]) are set to extend in depth with tariff increases and expand in scope beyond core industries and with fewer exceptions, it will be critical to follow them from policymaking to implementation. This project aims to investigate the role of legal experts in translating models of economically efficient greenhouse gas emissions taxation into operational tax systems and implementing them in national legal jurisdictions. Through a comparison of three European countries with different energy-industrial composition – Denmark, Norway and France – the study will give us new insights into the implementation and operation of policies deemed central to a just and effective transition.
The study will combine methods from the sociology of professions and expertise and public administration by relying on a mapping of national professional structures, interviews with experts in and outside the public sector and policy discourse analysis. The study thus places itself in a sociological tradition of investigating the relationship between expertise and politics as drivers of societal change.
The project focuses on three main aspects of carbon taxation: first a ‘mapping’ of the professional structure of ‘green tax expertise’, focusing on what professional work is associated with the establishment of carbon tax systems, and which groups are claiming this work in the private and public sector. Second, how these changes impact the expertise and organisation of existing corporate tax lawyers. Third, how the current policy processes around the expansion in scope of carbon tax systems (as for example in the cases of agriculture, carbon capture and firm excemptions) are impacted and seen by different legal expert groups.
JUSTCARBON is funded by the European union.
