The Charles H. Levin Memorial Book Prize 2019 goes to ''A Good Life on a Finite Earth: The Political Economy of Green Growth" by Daniel J. Fiorino- Congratulations!
The Award Committee has selected “A Good Life on a Finite Earth: The Political Economy of Green Growth” by Daniel J. Fiorino as the 2019 recipent of the Levine Award. The book develops a coherent argument for how green growth is possible, and why it is a necessary priority for governments in the 21st Century. According to Fiorino, the concept of green growth outlines a development goal that balances ecological and social as well as economic benefits. It is an orientation to economic development that is advocated by a wide array of international agencies and that has inspired a great deal of innovative policies around the world.
Fiorino’s book traces the development of the concept and shows how its effort to balance an ecological perspective with the concerns for promoting economic growth have engendered criticism from both left and right. Yet, many governments are successfully experimenting with green growth policies and programs. Assessing these experiments, Fiorino finds that a green growth agenda is best supported by a specific set of governance principles and institutions he calls “ecological governance”. He finds that economic development is linked to environmental improvements because increasing wealth makes people more sensitive to environmental impacts, and because increases in the quality of government has a significant effect on reducing environmental impact. The drivers are both institutional and technical. In technical terms, improvements in the efficiency of governance also lead to better management of resources. In institutional terms, Fiorino shows how broadly inclusive participatory institutions, such as corporatism, perform better than more exclusive and authoritarian institutions.
A Good Life on a Finite Earth is both a passionate plea for societies to place more attention on green growth concerns and a practical handbook of best practices that can be emulated by other countries. As such, it is an excellent example of the mission of the our IPSA research committee to present scientific understandings of policy and administration in ways that are useful and practical for policy makers and in public discussion. This is an highly important, comparative and well-executed book which the award committee is pleased to cite for this year’s Levine Prize.
***************************************
Each year, the International Political Science Association’s Research Committee on the Structure of Governance sponsors the Levine Prize. It is named in honour of Charles H. Levine, who was a distinguished member of the Research Committee and served on the editorial board of its official journal, Governance. The prize is awarded on the recommendation of a distinguished committee for the best book on comparative administration or public policy published in the previous year. This year’s committee was composed of Professors Linda White (University of Toronto, Canada), Kutsal Yesilkagit (Leiden University, The Netherlands) and Robert Cox (University of South Carolina, United States).
