Hans Bruyninckx

Executive Director of the European Environment Agency

Hans Bruyninckx completed a PhD degree in 1996 at Colorado State University, United States, on the topic of international environmental politics. From 2010 until his appointment at the EEA, he was head of the HIVA Research Institute of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He was a senior member of the interdisciplinary Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies. Over the last 20 years, he has conducted and managed policy-oriented research in the areas of environmental politics, climate change, and sustainable development. He was responsible for research in the domains of policy evaluation, monitoring and reporting, methodology development, environmental policy integration, and more recently also on long-term transition policies. His academic expertise lies primarily in the field of European and international environmental policy, studying the effects of globalisation on the global governance of environmental issues and sustainable development. He has published extensively on EU environmental policies and its role as an actor in global environmental governance. He was involved in numerous policy processes as an advisory board member, involved in steering groups of government agencies, and as academic policy advisor to governmental agencies and other key actors.