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Meet our Team

  • a woman in yellow

    Professor Veerle Heyvaert

    Veerle Heyvaert is a Professor at LSE Law School and founding Editor-in-Chief of Transnational Environmental Law. She is also Associate Dean of LSE Law School. She teaches environmental law and European law. She has an LL.M. from Harvard Law School and a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence (It). In 1998-1999, she was the inaugural Sir Peter North Fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies and Keble College, Oxford. She has published extensively on issues of transnational environmental law and risk regulation, including books on Transnational Environmental Regulation and Governance. Purpose, Strategies and Principles (CUP, 2019) and European Environmental Law (CUP, 2017, with S. Kingston & A Čavoški).

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    Joana Setzer

    Joana Setzer is an Associate Professorial Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Joana is also co-Chair of the Climate Accountability working group of the Climate Social Science Network and is Co-Lead of the Mobilising legal, political, and governance systems theme of LSE’s Global School of Sustainability. Her main areas of expertise are climate litigation and global environmental governance.

    Since 2013 she has been involved, and since 2020 she leads the Grantham Research Institute’s Climate Change Laws of the World  project – the most comprehensive global resource on climate policy and legislation.

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    Professor Robert Falkner

    Robert Falkner is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a Distinguished Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. He serves as the Academic Dean of the TRIUM Global EMBA programme, jointly run by LSE, NYU Stern and HEC Paris, and was previously the Research Director of the LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. He has published widely on international political economy and global environmental politics, including books on The Market in Global International Society: An English School Approach to International Political Economy (co-authored, 2025), Great Powers, Climate Change, and Global Environmental Responsibilities (co-edited, 2022) and Environmentalism and Global International Society (2021). His new book, on Green Political Economy, will be published in September 2026.

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    Dr Ashfaq Khalfan

    Dr Ashfaq Khalfan is the Director of the Sustainability Regulation Observatory and a Distinguished Policy Fellow at LSE. His work focuses on critical analysis of sustainability regulation and its political economy, with an emphasis on regulatory design choices that are politically and economically sound and advance human rights, equality and environmental protection.

    He brings over two decades of international leadership at the intersection of climate governance, sustainable development and human rights. He previously served as the Director of Climate Justice at Oxfam America, leading research, advocacy, litigation and policy development on energy transition, climate finance, climate inequality and tax and climate policy. Previously, he was Director of the Law and Policy Programme at Amnesty International where he oversaw Amnesty’s first global climate strategy and directed legal and policy research, analysis and advocacy spanning civil liberties, criminal justice, strategic litigation and environmental impacts on human rights.

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    Dr Marie Petersmann

    Dr Marie Petersmann is an Assistant Professor of Law at LSE Law School, and Director of the Sustainability Law & Policy Clinic (SLPC) of LSE's Global School of Sustainability (GSoS). Her work focuses on international law, ecology, and critical theory. She holds a PhD from the European University Institute (Florence) and an LLM from the Graduate Institute (Geneva). Marie is the author of When Environmental Protection and Human Rights Collide: The Politics of Conflict Management by Regional Courts (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She sits on the Editorial Board of the Review of European, Comparative & International Environmental Law (RECIEL), and is series editor at Amsterdam University Press. Prior to the LSE, Marie was Senior Researcher at Tilburg Law School (2020-2023), Resident Fellow at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome (2022-2023), Postdoctoral Fellow at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development in Utrecht (2019-2020), and Teaching Associate at the Strathclyde Center for Environmental Law and Governance in Glasgow (2018-2019).

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    Chloé F. Smith

    Chloé F. Smith is a Policy Officer at the Sustainability Regulation Observatory (SRO) and the Sustainability Law and Policy Clinic (SLPC) at LSE. Her work focuses on supporting policy-oriented analysis and engagement on legal strategies that promote sustainability, and connecting students with real-world projects that advance environmental and social justice. She was admitted to the Swiss Bar, after completing her studies at the University of Geneva and has an LL.M. with a specialisation in Environmental Law from UC Berkeley.

    Chloé previously practiced law in Switzerland and then served as a Climate Change Research Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment (CLEE) where she authored policy reports on transportation. She engaged in advocacy before the UN Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council, most recently supporting the Alaska Community Action on Toxics (ACAT) and Sivuqaq tribes in collaboration with the UC Berkeley’s Environmental Law Clinic.