The ULB’s Faculty of Law and Criminology is recruiting a full-time doctoral candidate in law, funded by a four-year doctoral scholarship. [1]
The successful candidate will contribute to the research activities of the Centre for European Law by developing and completing an original and independent doctoral thesis in European Union (EU) environmental law. While the precise topic and design of the thesis will be determined by the candidate, the PhD project should engage with themes related to climate inequalities and EU environmental law, in connection with the ULB-funded research project ‘CLUE – ‘Climate Law in an Unequal Europe’ (see project description below).
The PhD will be conducted under the supervision of Professor Chiara Armeni, Professor of Environmental law, Director of the Centre for European law at ULB and CLUE project’s PI.
CLUE – ‘Climate Law in an Unequal Europe’.
A wide interdisciplinary literature explores the social impact of the climate transition in the European Union (EU) through the frame of “climate inequalities”. This notion highlights the multifaceted and uneven distribution of climate-related burdens and benefits, encompassing inequalities in socio-economic vulnerability to climate policies, unequal access to decision-making, and disparities in both emissions patterns and exposure to climate risks. Although legal and policy mechanisms are in place to address some of these imbalances, climate inequalities underpin an increasing demand for a just transition in the EU. However, within this broad debate, environmental law research remains limited and fragmented, leading to a gap in the scholarship. As the just transition is set to become one of the EU’s central policy challenges in the years ahead, the link between climate inequalities and EU environmental law deserves more attention.
Led by Prof. Chiara Armeni, the CLUE project – ‘Climate Law in an Unequal Europe’ – aims to address this gap by critically exploring the role of environmental law and legal rights in tackling climate inequalities within the framework of the European Just Transition. Its specific goals are:
- to deepen our understanding of how environmental law can both exacerbate and address the social challenges of the climate transition,
- to examine whether and how environmental rights and social rights interact within climate litigation and the so-called “just transition litigation” in the EU, and whether such interaction might help address climate inequalities, and
- to inform a new theory of Just Transition that reflects the complex interplay between inequalities, rights, and institutions.
Ultimately, this project seeks to question the role of law in addressing climate inequality and advance environmental law scholarship in this field.
You can find the full vacancy and the application procedure here.
[1] Subject to Final Administrative Validation on 22 June 2026.
