CARE 2026-2027 STUDENT OPPORTUNITIES CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

As a member of the 2027 CARE-WSL cohort, you will join a team working on a policy challenge at the forefront of climate, sustainability and social justice.

This year’s research topics are:

1. Cooling Paris from the Top Down: What Can We Learn from International Retrofit Programmes to Address Overheating and Energy Poverty?
2. Sufficiency Agoras: What Can Paris Learn from Citizens’ Assemblies and Participatory Governance Around the World?
3. Data Centres, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Sustainable Cities: Paris and Île-de-France
4. Mobility Demand Avoidance: Trips, Car Dependence and Proximity
5. Sufficiency and Social Justice: Designing Inclusive Sufficiency Policies for Paris’s Priority Neighbourhoods (QPV)

A detailed description of each topic can be found at the end of the Call.

Using innovative tools developed by the World Sufficiency Lab, including ChatSufficiency and the Sufficiency MOOC, students will contribute to research designed to inform public policy and urban governance. Working in small teams, students will develop evidence-based recommendations and produce a professional policy brief.

Applicants will be asked to indicate their first and second theme preferences.

Throughout the project, you will:

• Work collaboratively in an interdisciplinary research team.
• Gain hands-on experience conducting policy-relevant research.
• Develop expertise in climate governance, sustainability transitions and sufficiency. 
• Strengthen your skills in i) comparative policy analysis, ii) qualitative and quantitative research methods, iii) expert interviewing and stakeholder engagement, iv) Data analysis and visualisation, v) Policy communication and policy brief writing and vi) GIS and spatial analysis (depending on the project)
• Learn from researchers, practitioners and policymakers working on climate and sustainability issues.

Participants will also benefit from a series of online training workshops covering research methods, collaborative work, evidence synthesis, policy brief writing, data visualisation and communicating findings to decision-makers.

The project will begin with an online launch session on 9 December 2026, from 6:00 to 7:00pm Paris time.

A meeting for the full cohort will take place on a Wednesday once a month at 5:00pm Paris time. Each team will also have one additional team meeting per month, alongside independent and collaborative research between sessions.

Workshops will accompany students through the different stages of the research process, including working effectively in international teams, formulating a policy research question, literature review and research tools, policy brief writing, and data visualisation.

Teams will progressively develop their projects throughout the year, from defining their research questions and reviewing relevant literature and datasets to producing and revising their final policy briefs. Students will receive feedback at different stages of this process.

An important component of the project is the CARE-WSL Sufficiency Summer School, taking place in France from 31 May to 5 June 2027.

The Summer School will bring together students from the current cohort with researchers, practitioners and alumni from previous editions for a week of learning, exchange and collaboration around sufficiency and sustainable transitions.

Applicants should save these dates and plan to be available to participate in the Summer School.

Further information about the schedule and practical arrangements will be shared with selected students.

The project is intentionally interdisciplinary, and we actively seek teams that bring together diverse perspectives, experiences and skills.

Previous experience in climate policy, sustainability, urban governance or research methods is an asset but is not required. We are above all looking for curious, motivated and collaborative students eager to contribute to innovative solutions for a sustainable and just future.

Strong applicants will demonstrate:

• A strong interest in climate, sustainability, governance, or social and environmental transitions.
• Motivation to engage in collaborative and interdisciplinary research.
• Curiosity about emerging policy challenges and innovative solutions.
• Willingness to commit consistently to a collaborative research project from December to June.

When applying, please:

• indicate both a first and second theme preference;
• highlight relevant language skills, particularly French and English; and
• briefly describe any relevant coursework, research experience, professional activities or personal interests connected to the project's themes.

Selection will take place in two stages.

Step 1 – Application and pre-selection

Submit your application by 15 October 2026.

Applications will be reviewed by the project team, and approximately 20 students will be pre-selected, alongside a waiting list. Applicants will be informed of the outcome by 20 October.

Step 2 – Sufficiency MOOC

Pre-selected students will be asked to complete the Sufficiency MOOC as a condition for confirming their place in the project.

The MOOC represents approximately 12 hours of work, including course videos and associated quizzes, and will provide all participants with a shared grounding in sufficiency before the research phase begins.

The MOOC must be completed by 2 November 2026.

Students on the waiting list will also be given access to the MOOC. If a pre-selected student does not complete it by the deadline, their place may be offered to a waitlisted student who has successfully completed the MOOC.

Application deadline: 15 October 2026

Submit your application here.

How can cities protect residents from extreme heat while reducing energy poverty and improving housing quality? This project explores one of the most pressing challenges facing Paris and many other cities: overheating in top-floor homes.

WSL identified more than 91,000 priority dwellings most vulnerable to both summer heat and winter cold. This project moves from diagnosis to solutions. Students will investigate successful retrofit and urban-cooling programmes from Canadian cities and beyond to assess how these approaches could be adapted to Paris.

Working as a team, you will analyse real-world policies, interview international experts, and develop evidence-based recommendations for how Paris can improve thermal comfort both in winter and summer, reduce energy demand, and better protect vulnerable households.

Key Research Questions

• Which international retrofit and urban-cooling programmes have successfully reduced overheating and energy demand while promoting social equity?
• What policy, financial, legal, and governance arrangements have made these programmes effective?
• Which measures could realistically be adapted to the Paris and Greater Paris context?
• What would a practical, socially just retrofit strategy look like for the priority housing stock identified in the WSL 2026 study?

What You Will Do

Throughout the project, you will:

• Identify, review and compare 6 to 8 leading programmes in Canada and worldwide focused on cooling, roof retrofits, and climate-resilient housing. The final selection of case studies will be refined by the research team at the start of the project.
• Develop and apply a common evaluation framework to assess programme effectiveness.
• Conduct policy analysis using municipal reports, academic literature, and international case studies.
• Interview practitioners, policymakers, and researchers involved in the selected programmes.
• Assess how successful approaches could be transferred to Paris, taking account of local planning, housing, and financing frameworks.
• Design a set of policy recommendations tailored to the priority dwellings identified by previous CARE-WSL research.
• Contribute to the development of the next edition of the Paris Sufficiency Gap Report.

Paris is already a pioneer in democratic innovation. Through initiatives such as the Assemblée Citoyenne de Paris and the Budget Participatif, residents have gained new opportunities to contribute to public decision-making and help shape the future of their city. Yet important questions remain. How can citizen participation move beyond consultation to become a permanent and effective part of governance? How can democratic processes help navigate difficult choices between social needs and environmental limits? And what institutional designs are most effective in ensuring that citizens' recommendations lead to meaningful action?

This project examines innovative citizens' assemblies, participatory budgeting initiatives, and deliberative forums from across Europe, North America and beyond. Students will assess what works, compare international experiences, and develop a roadmap for implementing a Paris-based “Sufficiency Agora.”

This project builds on the Sufficiency Agora’s Guidebook, a major framework developed in 2026 by the WSL team to support the creation of deliberative bodies capable of addressing the complex challenges of climate transition, justice, and equity in an era of ecological overshoot. Students will investigate how citizens' assemblies, participatory councils, and other deliberative institutions operate in practice across different countries, assessing their strengths, limitations, and real-world impacts. Drawing on these international experiences, participants will identify lessons that could help Paris strengthen and deepen its existing participatory governance ecosystem.

Working as a team, you will evaluate real-world experiences from around the world and help design a potential Paris Agora of Sufficiency: a deliberative body dedicated to supporting democratic decision-making on sustainability, wellbeing, and resource use.

Key Research Questions

• What makes a deliberative body effective, legitimate, and influential?
• Which institutional designs encourage diverse participation and long-term engagement?
• Why do some citizen assemblies successfully shape public policy while others have limited impact?
• How can citizen participation help governments navigate trade-offs between social objectives and ecological constraints?
• What would a Paris-specific Sufficiency Agora look like, and how could it complement existing institutions such as the Assemblée Citoyenne de Paris?

What You Will Do

Throughout the project, you will:

• Investigate 6 to 8 pioneering deliberative and participatory governance initiatives from Europe, Canada and beyond and apply a research framework derived from the Sufficiency Agora’s Guidebook to evaluate their design and performance.
• Analyse policy documents, evaluation reports, academic literature, and public records.
• Conduct interviews with practitioners, facilitators, participants, public officials, and experts involved in deliberative processes.
• Compare institutional objectives with observed outcomes and identify key success factors and challenges.
• Develop recommendations for strengthening democratic participation in Paris.
• Design a Paris-specific model for a future Agora of Sufficiency and assess how it could complement existing participatory institutions.

From artificial intelligence to cloud computing and streaming services, our increasingly digital world depends on a rapidly expanding network of data centres. While these facilities are essential to modern economies, they also consume large amounts of electricity, water, and land, raising important questions about equity, sustainability and urban planning.

Paris and the wider Île-de-France region already host one of Europe's largest concentrations of data centres, and demand is expected to grow further as AI applications expand. At the same time, the region has committed to ambitious climate objectives, including major reductions in energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions.

This project builds on the 2025 CARE-WSL cohort’s work on digitalisation and the findings from the 2026 Paris Sufficiency Gap Report. It will explore one of the most important emerging questions in climate governance: how can cities benefit from digital innovation while ensuring that growing digital infrastructure remains compatible with environmental and social goals?

Working as part of an interdisciplinary research team, you will investigate the environmental footprint of data centres, assess international policy responses, and develop recommendations for how Paris can manage future growth in a way that aligns with sufficiency principles.

Key Research Questions

• What is the current environmental footprint of data centres in Paris and Île-de-France?
• How might data-centre energy demand evolve by 2030 under different digital-growth scenarios?
• What policies can help balance digital infrastructure expansion with climate and energy targets?
• How can waste heat generated by data centres be recovered and reused to benefit communities, district heating networks, or other local activities?
• What can Paris learn from other cities and countries facing similar challenges?

What You Will Do

Throughout the project, you will:

• Build an inventory of data centres across Paris and the Île-de-France region using publicly available datasets and industry sources.
• Analyse trends in electricity consumption, carbon emissions, water use, cooling technologies, and heat-recovery systems.
• Explore different future scenarios for digital growth, including the impact of expanding AI applications.
• Conduct interviews with stakeholders from industry, government agencies, infrastructure operators, and energy networks.
• Investigate how other cities and countries regulate data-centre development and energy use.
• Assess opportunities for recovering waste heat and integrating it into local energy systems.
• Develop policy recommendations that could inform future planning and climate strategies in Paris.
• Contribute to the next edition of the Paris Sufficiency Gap Report.

The most sustainable journey is often the one that never needs to happen. This project explores how urban planning, services, and local accessibility can reduce unnecessary travel demand. Students will investigate policies that promote proximity, reduce car dependence, and support more sustainable patterns of work, care, and daily life.

Paris is internationally recognised for pioneering the concept of the “15-minute city” (ville du quart d'heure), where residents can access essential services, jobs, education, healthcare, and leisure activities close to home. Yet not everyone benefits equally from this vision. Care workers travelling between clients, night-shift employees, older adults, people with disabilities, and many low-income workers often face mobility challenges that proximity-based planning alone does not fully address.

This project explores a fundamental but often overlooked question: how can cities reduce the need to travel, rather than simply making travel more sustainable? Drawing on the principles of sufficiency and using the WSL Sufficiency Atlas, students will investigate how urban planning, workplace policies, mobility management, and service provision can reduce unnecessary travel demand while ensuring equitable access to opportunities for all residents.

Working as part of an interdisciplinary team, you will analyse mobility patterns in Paris, study innovative policies from leading cities, and develop recommendations for creating a more inclusive and sustainable mobility system.

Key Research Questions

• How do people currently move around Paris, and how do mobility patterns differ across neighbourhoods and population groups?
• Which policies are most effective in reducing the need for travel while maintaining accessibility and quality of life?
• How can mobility policies be designed to address the needs of groups that are often overlooked in urban mobility planning?
• What can Paris learn from Canadian cities and international examples of demand-reduction and proximity-based planning?
• How can mobility demand-avoidance contribute to climate goals, public health, and social equity simultaneously?

What You Will Do

Throughout the project, you will:

• Build a detailed picture of mobility patterns in Paris using the WSL Sufficiency Atlas, which provides transport, demographic, and spatial datasets.
• Analyse trip volumes, travel distances, modal choices, and motorisation rates across different neighbourhoods and social groups.
• Investigate innovative mobility-demand reduction policies implemented in other cities.
• Conduct interviews with care workers, service workers, and other groups whose mobility needs are often overlooked.
• Examine the relationship between mobility, care work, accessibility, and social inclusion.
• Assess different policy instruments through a sufficiency lens.
• Develop a policy package for future revisions of Paris mobility strategies, including the Plan Vélo, Plan Piéton, and broader transport planning frameworks.
• Contribute to identifying how proximity-based urban planning can be made more inclusive and equitable.

Climate policies can only succeed if they improve people's lives and leave no one behind. Yet communities facing social and economic disadvantages often experience the impacts of climate change most intensely while benefiting least from sustainability policies. This project explores how sufficiency can become a tool for both climate action and social justice.

Paris's Quartiers Prioritaires de la Politique de la Ville (QPV) are home to many residents facing interconnected challenges, including housing vulnerability, energy poverty, digital exclusion, limited access to services, and financial insecurity. While many of Paris's climate and sustainability initiatives aim to improve quality of life, their impacts are rarely assessed through an equity lens. In some cases, well-intentioned environmental improvements can even contribute to rising housing costs and displacement, a phenomenon often referred to as eco-gentrification.

This project addresses one of the most significant gaps identified in the Paris Sufficiency Gap Report: understanding who benefits from sufficiency policies and who may be left behind. Drawing on quantitative, qualitative, and spatial analysis, the project will examine how the six sufficiency dimensions explored in the Sufficiency Gap Report – housing, mobility, energy, food, digitalisation, and care – are experienced in Paris's QPV neighbourhoods.

Students will assess existing policies, identify delivery gaps, and develop policy instruments designed to improve outcomes for vulnerable communities while preventing unintended consequences such as displacement and exclusion.

Working as part of an interdisciplinary team, students will investigate how sufficiency policies affect residents of priority neighbourhoods and develop practical policy solutions that can simultaneously advance climate objectives, social inclusion, and urban justice.

Key Research Questions

• How are the six dimensions of sufficiency experienced differently in Paris's priority neighbourhoods compared with the rest of the city?
• Which groups currently benefit from Paris's sufficiency policies, and where do important inequalities remain?
• How can climate and sustainability policies be redesigned to better address the needs of low-income households, seniors, migrants, and other vulnerable groups?
• What measures can help prevent eco-gentrification and ensure that environmental improvements remain socially inclusive?
• How can equity considerations be systematically integrated into future sufficiency governance frameworks?

What You Will Do

Throughout the project, you will:

• Analyse existing sufficiency measures through an equity lens, assessing how current policies affect different social groups and neighbourhoods.
• Use spatial, demographic, and socio-economic data to identify sufficiency gaps across Paris's priority neighbourhoods.
• Investigate international examples of inclusive climate and urban policies that successfully combine sustainability objectives with social justice outcomes.
• Conduct stakeholder interviews and review community-based initiatives to better understand local needs, challenges, and priorities.
• Design a set of targeted policy instruments to improve the effectiveness and fairness of sufficiency policies in areas such as housing, mobility, food access, energy affordability, digital inclusion, and community participation.
• Develop an eco-gentrification monitoring framework that can help policymakers identify and address unintended distributional impacts before they emerge.
• Contribute evidence and recommendations to future editions of the Paris Sufficiency Governance Review.

The CARE Sustainability in a Changing Climate Case Competition will take place virtually on Friday 20 November 2026, from 17:00 to 22:00pm CET.

Hosted by the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto, the competition brings together graduate students from across the four CARE partner institutions to develop innovative and actionable policy responses to a real-world sustainability challenge.

This year’s case will focus on urban electric vehicle (EV) policy, inviting students to engage with questions at the intersection of climate action, energy transitions, urban policy and sustainable mobility.

Application deadline : by Monday 19 October  at 11:59pm

Students will participate in teams and will receive the full case challenge 10 days before the competition.

During this preparation period, teams will research the issue, develop their policy response and prepare a presentation. Each team will be assigned a coach from the public or private sector, who will provide guidance and feedback as the team develops its solution.

On 20 November, teams will present their proposals virtually to a panel of judges drawn from the public and private sectors and faculty from across the four CARE partner institutions.

The winning team will receive a €500 prize, and its policy solution will be published on the CARE and Munk School websites.

Find out more: https://www.care-climate.com/news/care-sustainability-in-a-changing-climate-case-competition-meet-the-finalists/

Participating in the Case Competition requires a significant commitment during the 10 days preceding the final event. Students should expect to dedicate approximately 25 to 30 hours to the competition, including:

• participating actively in team meetings;
• conducting research and analysing the case;
• developing the team's policy recommendations and presentation;
• meeting and communicating with the team's coach; and
• participating in the full virtual competition on 20 November, from 17:00 to 22:00pm CET.

Applicants should therefore make sure that they are available during this period and able to commit fully to collaborative team work.

Each CARE partner will put forward two teams for the 2026 competition.

For Sciences Po students: Applications must be made by already constituted teams of 4-5 members.  

Students at other CARE institutions should check with their CARE team whether applications are made individually or in teams.

For Sciences Po Students to be considered for the CARE Case Competition, please complete the application form by Monday 19 October 2026 at 11:59pm CET.

Students from other CARE institutions will receive their university's application form by email. Keep an eye on your inbox!!

Lead: University of Guelph, Elizabeth Shantz and Dr. Alex Sawatzky

Dates: TBC

Topic: From Data to Dialogue — Designing Infographics that Connect

Description: Students explore how research can be translated into impactful public engagement and policy-relevant knowledge products (ie infographics).

Format: Online project

Eligibility:

• First year students – Limit of 6 students

Time commitment: 3 to 5 hours per week over 6 weeks.

Funding: Stipend available.

Lead Institution: University of Guelph

Faculty Lead: Dr. Karina Benessaiah, College of Social and Applied Human Sciences, Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics, Social Practice and Transformational Change

Dates: January 2027 - April 2027

Topic: Understanding Sustainability Transformations

Format: Online work from November - February

Eligibility: Limited to 6 students. Masters students from all 4 CARE partner institutions. Must be comfortable speaking in French and English.

Time commitment: 7-10 hours per week

Funding: Students will receive a stipend.

Description: Details on this project will be shared at a later date. Please reach out to Jeanna Rex at jeannar@uoguelph.ca for information.

Host institution: University of British Columbia (UBC)

Faculty lead: CARE Consortium

Conference dates: March 2027

Theme: Energy transitions

Description: The CARE Poster Presentation & Networking Showcase provides students with an opportunity to present research, policy analysis, applied projects and innovative ideas related to climate action, adaptation, resilience, governance and sustainability.

Posters may draw on CARE activities, including courses, applied projects and case competitions, or on independent work connected to CARE themes. We particularly welcome submissions that demonstrate interdisciplinary thinking, applied insights and creative approaches to climate challenges. The showcase offers a unique opportunity to share your work, receive feedback and connect with students, faculty and practitioners from across the CARE consortium.

Format:

• Conference poster presentation
• Networking showcase
• In-person participation at the CARE Annual Conference

Eligibility:

• Year 1 and Year 2 students
• All CARE partner universities

Funding: Selected students will receive travel support from their home institution to attend the conference.

Selection process: Details will be shared in November 2026.