I am an environmental social scientist working at the intersection of environmental justice, environmental humanities, and critical food studies. Over the last decade, my different research projects have focused on justice issues posed by the governance of agricultural biodiversity, the conservation of protected areas, and the intensification of land-use changes, among others. I have conducted comparative, mixed-method research in Belgium, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, and worked in collaboration with environmental scientists, legal scholars, philosophers, geographers, anthropologists, and environmental economists. Since joining the European School of Political and Social Sciences in 2017, I started developing a series of projects aiming at diversifying the field of environmental justice research.

My research findings have been published in journals like Nature Sustainability, BioScience, Biological Conservation, the Journal of Rural Studies, the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, and Global Environmental Politics, to name a few, and I have edited the recently published Environmental Justice: Key Issues (Routledge), the first textbook to offer a comprehensive and accessible overview of the field of environmental justice studies. I have also (co)authored several research reports on environmental policy for the European Commission, the Belgian government, and the UK House of Commons (see publications section).

During my PhD, my work aimed at understanding the meaning and importance of justice challenges posed by the conservation of agricultural biodiversity, and the way in which conservation is being used to achieve justice in Western European farming contexts. Through extensive interviews and participant observation, and drawing on Nancy Fraser’s theory of justice, I showed how, beyond the rather straightforward climate adaptation goals, conservation efforts are being used by farming communities to redistribute or communalize resources; to combat harmful public policy; to re-anchor agricultural science in environment-specific practices and collective knowledge; to (re)build common forms of rural identity and citizenship; and/or to encourage self-determination and the empowerment of farmers.

I am currently a part of 4 different research projects related to the study of environmental justice. I am currently leading the project “Towards ‘just conservation’: linking theories and practices of justice in biodiversity conservation” funded by the French Foundation for Research on Biodiversity, in which our research team analyses how concerns for justice and equity are approached by biodiversity conservation practitioners, and how this influences conservation effectiveness.

Research projects, grants and prizes