Claire Dupont is a Senior Associate Fellow at the Brussels School of Governance and Professor at the Political Science department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). She is one of two leading postdoctoral researchers of the EDGE programme on Evaluating Democratic Governance in Europe. Claire also regularly attends international conferences and seminars, has been an invited keynote speaker in Brussels and in Tallinn, teaches for IES Master courses (using multiple and innovative teaching methods), provides guest lectures at many partner universities in Belgium and (co-)supervises Masters and PhD students working on topics linked to her research interests. Claire has been a member of the IES team since 2008, when she moved to Brussels to join the environmental and sustainable development research cluster.
Claire's research has focused mainly on the level of the EU, but with insights from multi-level and international governance also. She examines EU internal and external energy policy and diplomacy from the perspective of achieving long-term climate policy objectives and ensuring the EU decarbonises its economy by 2050. Beyond the specific empirical analyses, she assesses the potential for concepts like 'policy integration' to improve the quality of policymaking. Since 2015, Claire has developing a new research agenda on political representation as a potential route to ensuring climate change policy is sufficiently robust to preserve the planet for 'voiceless' but 'affected' populations and future generations. In 2013, Claire successfully defended her PhD thesis, entitled Climate Policy Integration into EU energy policy. Some of Claire's previous research work includes examining the leadership role of the EU in international climate policy, assessing the role of the European Council and the Council of Ministers in promoting this leadership role for the EU, and analysing the interaction between the international climate and international ozone regimes in the area of fluorinated gases.
