AICE-T – Team – LPTransition

The AICE-T team

Prof. dr. Tom Dedeurwaerdere – Academic, project lead

After a master thesis in engineering (published in Physical Review E. 53:498-506), and completing a Phd in Philosophy on the cognitive turn in the contemporary epistemology of intentional action (with Summa cum laude, published as a monograph), the promoter joined the Centre for Philosophy of Law (CPDR) at the Université catholique de Louvain to develop an international research program on the governance of science and technology in the specific field of genomics and biodiversity research.

Since 2002 he has been in charge of a research group on biodiversity governance within the CPDR, where he has coordinated a program on collective learning within the field of biodiversity governance and has supervised PhD and post-doc fellowships in the context of this research. The international recognition of this work appears early on through the participation in major international research projects dealing with theory of governance, with a leading role in 3 European Framework Programmes for Research and Innovation. A new step was taken by the promoter in his work on collective action, with the awarding of an ERC starting grant (2011-2016) on the building of global scientific research commons in genetic resource commons in three fields (plant genetic resources, microbial resources and animal genetic resources).

In parallel to the comparative governance analysis of global collective action conducted within the ERC grant, the promotor started to develop a research line on the deepening of the methodological choices made in contemporary interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, within research on sustainability transformations.

Different collaborative projects have been initiated in support of this research line. These projects have resulted in a series of highly cited publications on transdisciplinary research and stakeholder involvement in transition processes. Further, to support this line of research, the promotor created in 2014 a new inter-sectorial research centre LPTransition on transdisciplinary research methodologies for sustainability transitions, with 20 academic members from the social sciences, the humanities, engineering and the bio-physical sciences. The centre organizes a yearly conference with a call for papers on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research for sustainable development and coordinates a project on organizing interdisciplinary master theses on sustainable development at UCLouvain.

The research line on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research for social and ecological transition was consolidated in two research monographs. A first on the organization of “social innovation in the service of social and ecological transformation” at Routledge, a renowned publisher of academic books in the humanities and the social sciences. In parallel, the promotor finalized in 2023 a book monograph on “Transdisciplinary Research, Sustainability and Social Transformation: Governance and Knowledge Co-production”, which is currently in press in the Environment and Sustainability series of Routledge.

The AICE-T project builds upon the experience gained with interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research processes, with the view to improving our understanding of the governance of sustainability transformations processes in an environmental justice perspective.
tom.dedeurwaerdere@uclouvain.be

Prof. Dr. Brendan Coolsaet – Co-promoter

Following a MSc in Environmental Science and Policy (2011) at ULB – which was awarded the Henri La Fontaine Prize for best master thesis (ULB) – my first research projects focused on the implementation of the Nagoya Protocol in Europe and Belgium, and led to the publications of commissioned policy reports for the European Commission and the Belgian Government, and later to peer-reviewed publications in Resources (2013) and Global Environmental Politics (2015), as well as to my 1st edited volume, Implementing the Nagoya Protocol (Brill 2015).

During my ensuing PhD in Political and Social Sciences at the Centre for Philosophy of Law (UCLouvain, 2012-2016), 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 rural Western European. Through extensive interviews, participant observation and surveys conducted in Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, 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. Research results of my PhD were published in the Journal of Rural Studies (2016), in Biological Conservation (2016), and in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics (2015).

Following my PhD, I started expanding my focus to justice challenges posed by the use of other natural resources. In 2016-2017, I was a post-doc with the Global Environmental Justice research group at the University of East Anglia (UK), on a co-authored project (NERC funded) studying the social-ecological impacts of land-use intensification, combining narrative synthesis and spatial data analysis. While there is considerable hope that agricultural intensification can contribute to sustainable development, our findings published in Nature Sustainability (2018) showed that intensification is rarely found to lead to simultaneous positive impact for nature and people, but also that the distribution of these impacts is uneven, often favouring better off individuals at the expense of poorer ones.

In 2017, I joined the European School of Political and Social Sciences (ESPOL) in France as a Maître de conférences, where I taught a series of courses on environmental politics and on food/agriculture politics. Research-wise, I gradually launched different projects which focus on diversifying the field of environmental justice studies, either conceptually (beyond US-centric approaches) or geographically (in Europe). My recently published collective volume Environmental Justice: Key Issues (Routledge 2020), was an effort in making environmental justice scholarship accessible for aspiring environmental justice students and scholars, while at the same time giving visibility to less common approaches and ideas in the field.

This line of research was furthered through my current position as an FNRS Research Associate. My main project – Towards Environmental Justice in Europe (JUSTINE) – focuses on shaping and constructing an empirically-informed environmental justice theory in Europe. Both the theoretical and empirical framing of the JUSTINE project overlap with the current AICE-T proposal. In turn, the AICE-T proposal expands the disciplinary, geographic, and topical scope of the JUSTINE project. brendan.coolsaet@uclouvain.be

Prof. Dr. Julie Hermesse – Co-promoter

I am Professor of Anthropology at UCLouvain, holder of the Chair of Anthropology of Contemporary Europe, and member of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie prospective. My scientific career bears witness to the development of complementary expertise in the field of environmental anthropology and in the deployment of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research approaches; expertise that is essential for the deployment of the AICE-T project.

As part of an FNRS PhD grant, I spent over 15 months in Guatemala and defended my thesis in May 2011, which led to the publication of a monograph (Karthala Ed., 2016). This book approaches the question of disasters and the socio-natural deconstruction of these phenomena from the angle of political ecology and through the prism of symbolic anthropology. The results of this initial research aroused my interest in the urgent question of the transition of food systems. My research in Latin America, and later in the Philippines and Cuba, aroused my curiosity about the patterns of relations maintained by farmers with the natural environment.

Since 2015, in addition to ongoing research projects abroad in which I am a partner (four PRD- ARES projects in the Philippines, Bolivia, Senegal and Burundi), my empirical research has also taken root in Belgium and, more broadly, in Europe. I am co-coordinating a forthcoming publication by Academia-L’Harmattan entitled Du terrain (près de) chez soi – Epistémologies du “proche” en anthropologie.

Over the past eight years, my various research projects in Europe, and particularly in Brussels, have focused on (1) the agro-ecological transition (Co-Create/Ultra Tree project on the viability of small-scale market gardening in the Brussels suburbs; research on the locking- in of seed systems in Belgium and France) and more broadly on (2) understanding ecological transitions (Anticipate/CONACI and Co-Create/Wood in Molenbeek projects on the circular economy in Brussels).

This research into agricultural niches and the circular economy has encouraged me to decompartmentalize my epistemological and methodological approach, and to take a greater interest in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches.

As evidence of my expertise in inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, I would like to highlight the organization of four international study days: International Conf. Transdisciplinarity within universities (2018); European Conf. (re-)territorializing agriculture: between the promotion of local products and trade in Europe (2021); International Conf. Ecological justice as a transformative approach to the ecological transition (2021); From farm to fork. How can we turn the CAP into a climate-friendly agricultural policy? (2022), as well as the publication of papers in 2020 in the journal Natures Sciences et Sociétés (n°28, 3- 4), a paper in 2023 in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems (n°7) and the ongoing co-coordination of a special issue Agriculture (re-)territorialisation: Balancing the promotion of local products and international trade in Europe to be published in the journal Sustainability Science (with C. Frison, N. Loodts and N. Dendoncker).

julie.hermesse@uclouvain.be

Prof. Dr. Julie Hermans – Co-promoter

After a master thesis in business engineering, the promoter completed a Phd in Economics and Management on learning processes in University-Industry innovation projects in the context of a regional economy initiative – the competitive clusters of Wallonia (published as a monograph). Afterwards, she joined the centre for Research in Regional Economics and Economic Policy (CERPE, UNamur) as well as the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche Travail, État et Société (CIRTES, LouRIM, UCLouvain) as a post-doctoral researcher. Since September 2016, while still an associate member of those research centres, the promoter is now a faculty member of the LouRIM, where she develops a research program on entrepreneurial practices in contexts of multiple-goal pursuit such as innovation (exploration-exploitation goals) and sustainable entrepreneurship (business-social- environmental goals).
This research program focuses on the way entrepreneurs (and other stakeholders) make sense of their entrepreneurial actions in contexts where multiple goals are salient, and which are informed by multiple, sometimes conflicting, logics of action. This has led to the financing of two research projects, one international (INTERREG) and the other collaborating with regional partners (Innoviris R&D project). Furthermore, the promoter supervises three PhD thesis directly related to the topic of social and sustainable entrepreneurship. Two of them were defended recently (Julie Solbreux’s work on narratives in sustainable entrepreneurship education in November 2022; Anais Angelucci’s work on framing in social enterprises in August 2023). The third one (Chloé Faton’s work on narratives for sustainable entrepreneurs in the construction sector) is expected to be defended in 2025. This research program has led to multiple international collaborations and publications in peer- reviewed international journals. More recently, the promoter was invited to join the editorial committee of “revue de l’entrepreneuriat”, where she is in charge of the social & sustainable entrepreneurship section.
In articulation with her program on entrepreneurial practices for multiple-goal pursuit, the promoter has also kept a keen interest on learning processes, which she first studied in the context of her doctoral work. Recently, she has focused on the role of materiality in learning processes, both in education and sustainable entrepreneurship. The use of artefacts is especially important as mediation objects that would allow for multiple stakeholders to understand each other’s and to co-create knowledge. This has led to the development of two complementary research lines. The first one is the development of an innovative method (the scaffolding conversation method, see Solbreux et al., in press), which shows how narratives can be collected and analysed at the individual, group and ecosystem levels, providing members with opportunities to reflect on their shared experiences, struggles and hopes. The second one is about the study of entrepreneurial learning through gamified artefacts. The promoter was recently invited to share her contributions in the Research Handbook of Entrepreneurial Learning. Together, those research lines point to the importance of narratives as artefacts for challenging preconceptions and reconstructing shared knowledge, which is central for sustainability transition.
Intertwining her two main research interests, the present project builds upon the experience gained with narrative approaches for studying sustainable entrepreneurial practices in order to analyse and identify the circular economy’s contributions to a just transition. This approach considers that individual struggles are often rooted in broader social and political contexts and that the co-construction of stories by people in collectives can open up their possibilities for action. It is especially relevant for studying environmental injustices in the circular economy, as entrepreneurs and their stakeholders can struggle with multiple, and sometimes conflicting, logics of action, that may impede a just transition.

julie.hermans@uclouvain.be

Full Prof. Dr. Matthieu de Nanteuil – Co-promoter

I am professor in sociology at the UCLouvain, since 2001, within the Louvain School of Management, with a PhD in sociology (Sciences Po Paris) and a degree in philosophy (Paris X Nanterre). In terms of research, my work is focused on the reformulating the social question, around which sociology has been built since its origins, in three directions.
First by focusing on new forms of injustice in the workplace, in particular around the ethical dilemmas and value conflicts encountered by different actors in organizations, both for profit and non‐profit. To this end, I designed a method based on deliberative workshops in organizational settings allowing participants to deal with and overcome these conflicts by relying on collective intelligence practices, entitled Ethical Dilemmas in Contemporary Organizations (EDICO). After having given rise to numerous training courses (with coaches and actors in the social economy and agro‐ecology), this method is now the subject of funding by INNOVIRIS to “test” its applicability in the hospital sector, for future development. This work is based on numerous publications, individual and collective, in particular: Justice in the Workplace. Overcoming Ethical Dilemmas (London, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021) and Rendre justice au travail. Ethique et politique dans les organisations (Paris, PUF, 2016), as well as several doctoral theses.
Second I broadened this research focus on the social question to that of environmental justice, in particular through initiating new thematic researches on agro‐ecological transitions, “just transition” and access to natural resources against backdrops of armed conflict in Latin American Countries. On this theme, I participated in the publication of three collective volumes (In Stassart, P. et al. (2021): “What Models of Justice for the Agro‐ecological Transition? The Normative Backdrops of the Transition”; In Hecquet, C. and al. (2022): “ Les théories de la justice sociale au service de la justice écologique. Deux études de cas, une proposition politique”; In Bashizi, A. et al. (2023): “Thinking the Anthropocene against the Backdrop of Armed Conflict: Territory as a Site of Cognitive Production, Affective Participation and Discursive Imagination. A Colombia‐DRC comparison). This dynamic also led to the creation in 2022 of an FNRS contact group on ecological and social justice, entitled “Les Justes”.
Finally, the research on the social question is developed in an international context in relation to the scholarly work on moving from a “paradigm of social injustice” to a “paradigm of violence”, in particular a topic of my Accreditation to Direct Research, defended in France in 2018 (Paris Diderot University). This work was based on more than ten years of observation of the Colombian armed conflict, in connection with other regions of the world and on the work within the interdisciplinary research Chair “Democracy, cultures and engagement”, at UCLouvain, which deals with the relationship between violence and non‐violence in societies in economic transition. This work will result in a publication in two volumes, entitled “Face à la violence. Volume 1. Représentations. Volume
2. Résistances”, to be published by Bord de L’eau”. The first volume has been accepted for publication in 2024.
Furthermore, in 2017 I benefited from a grant for a post‐follow (move‐in, UCLouvain), which allowed me to initiate a collaboration with a Franco‐Norwegian philosopher, Anders Fjeld, with whom we proposed a cultural interpretation of the work of ‘Adam Smith, in: Fjeld, Anders and de Nanteuil, Matthieu. (2022). Le monde selon Adam Smith. Essai sur l’imaginaire en économie, Paris, PUF.

matthieu.denanteuil@uclouvain.be