Melanie van Driel was a PhD candidate within the GLOBALGOALS project. A political scientist by training, she specialized in International Relations – studying China, Central Eurasia, the MENA region and the post-Soviet countries of Eastern Europe – and policy and governance at the University of Amsterdam, with a focus on the political economy of energy. She worked as a lecturer at the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs at Leiden University before joining the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development. Within the GLOBALGOALS project, Melanie studied the steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals at the international level. She is also a book review editor for Comparative Sociology (Brill Publishers).