Anna Hehenberger Defends Dissertation on Green Growth and Decarbonization

At the beginning of October 2025, Anna Hehenberger successfully defended her dissertation, “Green Vanguards and Dependent Followers: Green Growth and Decarbonisation in Export-Led Economies” at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Using Denmark and Austria as case studies, she explores in her research why export-led economies decarbonize differently. Her analysis shows that the strategic orientation of a country’s export sector toward decarbonization is often what makes climate policy and decarbonization possible in the first place. Denmark’s early and continuing fast decarbonization is closely associated with its heavily export-led wind power industry, which benefits from global decarbonization efforts and drives green innovation. Austria, meanwhile, took longer to commit to decarbonization, which can be explained by an export structure that is oriented toward intermediate goods, where firms respond only to growing pressure from global demand. Hehenberger’s study shows how structural dependencies and global power relations shape the green transition on national levels – a perspective that goes beyond the usual decarbonization debates. Her supervisor at the MPIfG was Lucio Baccaro. Anna Hehenberger joined the International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy (IMPRS-SPCE) as a doctoral researcher in 2021 and will be staying at the MPIfG until the end of November of this year. From December she will be working as a postdoc at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Johannes Kepler University Linz.