Pascale Vielle is Professor of Social Law at UCLouvain, Belgium. Trained at the European University Institute, she has developed a comparative and institutional approach to social law, social security, gender equality and European social policy. Her early career included research and expert work at the European Commission, the International Labour Organization, the University of Geneva and ULB, before joining UCLouvain.
Her work examines how legal categories and institutions organise protection, vulnerability, equality, dependency and social conflict. Initially centred on the gendered foundations of social security, family responsibilities, work and welfare-state comparison, her research has progressively moved towards the ecological conditions of social law. She now works on social-ecological protection, care, ecofeminism, the social constitution under ecological finitude and institutional robustness.
She was resident fellow and later Chief Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Nantes. She recently coordinated the PRETS project on social-ecological protection in Belgium and co-authored, with Olli Kangas, a European Commission scoping study on social protection in societal and ecological transitions. She has served as an external evaluator for international research funding bodies, including as ERC SH2 Advanced Grants panel vice-president and for ICREA. She is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the European Fair Transition Observatory.