Karin Buhmann is a Professor with special responsibilities for Business and Human Rights at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), a Danish business university with a commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Sustainability. Professor Buhmann has an advanced Post-Doctoral degree (Dr.Scient.Adm) with a dissertation on Business and Human Rights, a PhD in law, and a Master’s Degree in international humanitarian and human rights law.
With a particular focus on human rights and social sustainability, her research and teaching revolves around Business and Human Rights, regulatory strategies and forms of regulation for CSR, with a strong focus on the interaction between public and private hard, soft and smart-mix regulation, and implementation in national and transnational contexts.
Since 2012 Professor Buhmann has served as one of five part-time members of the Danish National Contact Point (NCP) under the OECD’s Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises.
In 2014 she initiated The BHRight Initiative, an interdisciplinary academic network on research and teaching on Business and Human Rights. Professor Buhmann has published widely in international journals and edited volumes. She published a monograph on collaborative regulation in the evolution of transnational sustainability norms (Ashgate/Routledge) in August 2017. Another volume on the emergence of the Business and Human Rights regime is forthcoming with Edward Elgar publishers.
Recent journal articles include Buhmann, K (2015) ‘Business and Human Rights: Understanding the UN Guiding Principles from the perspective of Transnational Business Governance Interactions’, Transnational Legal Theory 6(1) 399–434, and Buhmann, K (2015) ‘Public regulators and CSR: The “Social Licence to Operate” in recent United Nations instruments on Business and Human Rights and the juridification of CSR’, Journal of Business Ethics DOI 10.1007/s10551-015-2869-9.