01.08.2016
The winner of the 2016 Levine Prize is Jennifer Hadden for her book "Networks in Contention: The Divisive Politics of Climate Change".
The committe says:
This interesting book examines civil society organizations’ choice of mobilization strategy on climate change. It documents how organizations operate and interact with one another within the international climate change movement, explains how an organization’s position in movement networks affects its decisions on advocacy tactics, and demonstrates how groups’ strategies influence the global climate policy debate. The book takes an explicitly comparative perspective in dealing with international policy struggles. It provides not only rich discussion of issues involving networks in the policy area of policy change, but also a model for examination of other policy areas that involve both governmental and nongovernmental actors. Written in an accessible style, the book can be used as supplemental readings for courses in different fields.
The volume’s theoretical contributions emerge from bridging the literature on social movements and collective action with the increasingly rich literature on social networks and their political consequences. Studying international networks presents difficulties of both data collection and causal inference. The book confronts these challenges through a powerful mixed research strategy that deploys a wide range of data sources at different levels of analysis to map out network structures, chart degrees and trajectories of contentious action, and trace out the mechanisms through which networks exert their effects on organizational decision making. The book’s triangulation across empirical strategies makes for a highly compelling set of findings.
The Award Committee is pleased to see this year’s Levine Prize go to this interesting book which makes a contribution of great academic and policy significance.
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The Levine Prize 2016 committee was composed of Professors Julia Fleischer (University of Bergen; Chair), Caspar van den Berg (University of Leiden) and Beryl A. Radin (Georgetown University).
