Nicole Dewandre
Biography
Nicole Dewandre joined the Egmont Institute in May 2025 as Senior Associate Fellow in the European Affairs programme. She had a 40 years-long-career at the Commission in Delors’ think tank (1986-1992), DG RTD (1992-2011), DG CNECT (2011-2016), the JRC (2016-2019), the President’s cabinet (2019-2023), and SG (2023-2024). She worked mostly on foresight and “science and society” policies: gender equality in research, partnership between civil society and researchers, harnessing EU-funded research to sustainable development, fostering human centricity of digital policies.
Nicole is currently visiting professor at the College of Europe (Bruges) and invited researcher at the Centre de Théorie Politique (ULB).
She studied applied physics engineering, economics, operations research and philosophy in Belgium (UC Louvain and ULB) and in the USA (UC Berkeley). She is also a Policy Fellow Alumni from the University of Cambridge.
External Publications
Books:
• L’Europe au soir du siècle, Identité et démocratie, Editions Esprit, Paris, 1992. (sous la dir. de, avec Jacques Lenoble)
• Critique de la raison administrative, pour une Europe ironiste, coll. “L’ordre philosophique”, Seuil, Paris, 2002.
Book Chapters:
• Rethinking the human condition in a hyperconnected era: why freedom is not about sovereignty, but about beginnings in the Onlife Manifesto, edited by Luciano Floridi, SpringerOpen, 2015
• Transformative literacy as the ability to look forward from within, in Transformation Literacy, Pathways to Regenerative Civilizations, edited by Petra Künkel and Kristin Vala Ragnarsdottir, Springer 2022
• European administration challenged by philosophy (and vice versa), dialogue with Edoardo Ongaro, in The Changing Topography of
EU Administration, edited by Didier Georgakakis, Palgrave MacMillan,
2024.
Peer-reviewed papers:
• Political Agents as Relational Selves, Rethinking EU politics and policies with Hannah Arendt, Philosophy Today, vol 62:2, 2018
• Sensitive economic personae and functional human beings, a critical metaphor analysis of EU policy documents between 1985 and 2014, with Orsolya Gulyas, Journal of Language and Politics, vol 17:6, 2018.
• L’administration européenne au défi de la philosophie (et inversement), dialogue avec Edoardo Ungaro, dans Revue Française d’Administration Publique, n°180, 2021