Dr Ivano Alogna Receives Prestigious Thesis Prize
The French Society for Environmental Law (Société Française pour le Droit de l'Environnement, SFDE) recently awarded Dr Ivano Alogna, BIICL Research Leader in Environmental and Climate Change Law, the Special Jury Prize for his PhD thesis
The Society confers honorary awards every two years to outstanding PhD theses written in French in law, administrative science or political science, that contribute to improving knowledge in Environmental Law.
Dr Alogna was awarded his PhD in Comparative and International Environmental Law by the Sorbonne Law School, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He successfully defended his thesis, The Circulation of Legal Models in the Field of the Environment: Towards a Global Environmental Law, in 2022 in front of a jury that voted unanimously to propose him for a thesis prize and a publication grant.
His thesis demonstrates that the engine of the evolution of Environmental Law, on a global scale and since its origins, has been, and still is, the phenomenon known as the circulation of legal models. Through it, concepts, principles, instruments and legal institutions are imitated and disseminated outside their original context. The theorisation of this phenomenon - a classic subject in Comparative Law literature made famous by the metaphor of "legal transplant" - makes it possible to analyse the development of Environmental Law resulting from the globalisation of environmental protection. Indeed, the analysis in this thesis has highlighted two fundamental "forces" of the globalisation of Environmental Law: the competition and the cooperation between systems and legal orders interacting in the global normative space. These interacting dynamics can produce coordination, harmonisation or a hybridisation-unification of legal norms in environmental matters. They are realised through varied kinds of circulation (horizontal, vertical or oblique) of different environmental legal models, at several levels and across all continents. These dynamics appear essential to respond to the complex issues of environmental protection and to ensure the evolution towards a Global Environmental Law.
The SFDE jury, composed of recognised academics, researchers and practitioners, decided to award Dr Alogna's PhD thesis the Special Prize, which "is intended to reward audacity, originality and/or scientific risk-taking for a particular scientific contribution to Environmental Law".
During the course of his PhD research, Dr Alogna was also honoured to receive the Eiffel Excellence Scholarship from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Vinci Scholarship from the French-Italian University Council, and a full PhD Scholarship from the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research.
Dr Alogna comments: "It is a great honour to receive this recognition for my research by the most illustrious learned societies in the field of environmental law in France. I am very grateful to the members of the SFDE jury as well as to my research supervisor, Professor François Guy Trébulle, and to all the fellow academics, lawyers and experts I met around the world, for their contribution to my reflection and for the rich and constructive exchanges on this fascinating research subject. I look forward to pushing the boundaries of Environmental and Climate Change Law through the lens of the epistemology of complexity, the teaching of Global Environmental Law and the circulation of ideas among different countries and fields of knowledge."
