Josephine van Zeben

Josephine van Zeben
Provost of the European University Institute
Incumbent
Assumed office March 2025 Serving with Giacomo Calzolari
President	Patrizia Nanz
Preceded by	Office established
Personal details
Born	Josephine A. W. van Zeben 1984 (age 41–42) Leiden, Netherlands
Education	University College Utrecht (BA) University of Edinburgh (LLB) University of Amsterdam (LLM, PhD) Harvard Law School (LLM)
Occupation	Legal scholar, university administrator
Known for	Environmental and European Union law; polycentric governance theory

Josephine A. W. van Zeben (born 1984) is a Dutch legal scholar specialising in environmental law, European Union law and regulation. Since March 2025, she has been Provost for Education and Academic Staff Development at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, one of two provosts appointed when the Institute created the office, serving alongside the economist Giacomo Calzolari, Provost for Research and External Relations.

She holds the Chair of Transnational Law at the EUI's Florence School of Transnational Governance and previously held the chair of the Law Group at Wageningen University, as well as a fellowship in public and EU law at Worcester College, Oxford. Her research applies polycentric governance theory - associated with the work of Elinor Ostrom - to the European Union and examines the allocation of regulatory competence in environmental and climate policy. She is one of the editors-in-chief of the journal Transnational Environmental Law and series editor of the associated Cambridge University Press book series.

Early life and education

Van Zeben was born in Leiden in 1984.

She read social sciences at University College Utrecht, graduating BA with honours in 2004 and spending part of her degree at the University of Bologna. She then took an LLB in Scots law at the University of Edinburgh and an LLM in European private law at the University of Amsterdam.

Van Zeben completed a PhD in law and economics at the University of Amsterdam in 2012, awarded cum laude, undertaken jointly at the Amsterdam Centre for Law and Economics and the Amsterdam Centre for Environmental Law and Sustainability. During 2010-11 she was a Hauser Global Scholar at New York University School of Law. She subsequently took an LLM at Harvard Law School in 2014 and holds an MA from the University of Oxford by decree.

Academic career

After completing her doctorate, van Zeben worked from 2012 to 2013 at the Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance as assistant research director and postdoctoral researcher, before spending 2013-14 as a postdoctoral researcher at the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, with a faculty affiliation at the Maurer School of Law. She has remained an affiliated faculty member of the Ostrom Workshop since 2014.

From 2014 to 2019 she was Fellow in Public and EU Law at Worcester College, Oxford, teaching constitutional law, administrative law and EU law, initially as a career development fellow. Between 2012 and 2022 she also taught environmental regulation, law and policy at ETH Zurich.

In 2019 van Zeben was appointed professor and chair of the Law Group at Wageningen University, taking up the post on 1 October. On her appointment she described her research as concerned with the way legal systems create and manage borders and with legal collaboration and competition across them. She held the chair until 2024.

Van Zeben joined the European University Institute on 1 September 2024 as Chair of Transnational Law at the Florence School of Transnational Governance, also serving as academic director of the Master in Transnational Governance. In March 2025, she became one of the EUI's first two provosts, taking responsibility for education and academic staff development. The role covers doctoral supervision, master's and executive education and postdoctoral programmes, exercised together with the Dean of Graduate Studies and the academic director of the Max Weber Programme, as well as academic staff development.

She has held visiting positions at Notre Dame Law School, Bocconi University and La Trobe Law School and is a Global Visiting Professor of Law at Notre Dame.

Research

Her first monograph, The Allocation of Regulatory Competence in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (2014), treats the European Union Emissions Trading System as a multi-level governance regime in which the regulatory process divides into three distinct competences - norm setting, implementation and enforcement - and asks whether these are best combined in a single regulator or distributed across levels of government. Drawing on legal, economic and political analysis, it argues that the actual allocation within the scheme departs from a hypothetical optimum and offers a political-economy explanation for that divergence. The book was reviewed in the Common Market Law Review.

A second strand of her work applies polycentric governance theory, developed in the study of commons institutions, to the European Union. The edited collection Polycentricity in the European Union (2019), with Ana Bobić, examines the extent to which the EU already exhibits polycentric features and whether such a development is normatively desirable.

She has also written on the role of sub-national actors, particularly local governments, within multi-level legal systems and on comparative environmental regulation in the European Union and the United States.

Editorial and professional roles

Van Zeben is one of the editors-in-chief of Transnational Environmental Law, published by Cambridge University Press, having joined as assistant editor in 2014 and its editorial board in 2017; she is also series editor of the Transnational Environmental Law book series. She has served on the editorial boards of the Croatian Yearbook of European Law and Policy and Istituzioni del Federalismo, and has been a board member of the Society for Environmental Law and Economics. She sits on the Transdisciplinary Advisory Board of JPI Climate.

Selected publications

Books

• van Zeben, Josephine (2014). The Allocation of Regulatory Competence in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-04226-1.
• van Zeben, Josephine; Bobić, Ana, eds. (2019). Polycentricity in the European Union. Cambridge University Press.
• Richards, Kenneth R.; van Zeben, Josephine, eds. (2020). Policy Instruments in Environmental Law. Edward Elgar.
• Rowell, Arden; van Zeben, Josephine (2020). A Guide to U.S. Environmental Law. University of California Press.
• van Zeben, Josephine; Rowell, Arden (2021). A Guide to EU Environmental Law. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-29522-3.
• de Almeida, Lucila; van Zeben, Josephine, eds. (2023). Law in the EU's Circular Energy System: Biowaste, Biofuel and Biogas. Edward Elgar.
• van Zeben, Josephine; Hilson, Chris, eds. (2025). A Research Agenda for Environmental Law. Edward Elgar.

Articles

• van Zeben, Josephine (2009). "The European Emissions Trading Scheme Case Law". Review of European Community & International Environmental Law. 18: 119–128.
• van Zeben, Josephine (2010). "The Untapped Potential of Horizontal Private Enforcement within EU Environmental Law". Georgetown International Environmental Law Review. 22: 241–269.
• van Zeben, Josephine; Dari-Mattiacci, Giuseppe (2012). "Legal and Market Uncertainty in Market-Based Instruments: The Case of the EU ETS". New York University Environmental Law Journal. 19 (2): 101–139.
• van Zeben, Josephine (2014). "Operationalizing Subsidiarity: Power-sharing in EU Environmental Law". Harvard Environmental Law Review. 38 (2): 415–464.
• van Zeben, Josephine (2015). "Establishing a Governmental Duty of Care for Climate Change Mitigation: Will Urgenda Turn the Tide?". Transnational Environmental Law. 4 (2): 339–357. doi:10.1017/S2047102515000199.
• Rowell, Arden; van Zeben, Josephine (2016). "A New Status Quo? The Psychological Impact of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change". European Journal of Risk Regulation. 7 (1): 49–53.
• van Zeben, Josephine (2018). "A Law and Economics Perspective on Judicial Risk Regulation". European Journal of Risk Regulation. 9 (1): 79–98.

External links

• Profile at the European University Institute