The SNIS International Geneva Committee has selected Prof. Liliana Andonova’s paper "Boomerangs to Partnerships? Explaining State Participation in Transnational Partnerships for Sustainability" among the three winning papers, out of a total of 18 high-level articles submitted for the award.

This article examines under what conditions states engage in transnational public–private partnerships for the environment. While there is hardly a disagreement in the literature on the rise of transnational actors and new modes of collaborative governance, their interaction with and impact on state institutions remain debated and insufficiently illuminated by empirical research.

Some scholars of globalisation interpret transnational partnerships as evidence of state insufficiency and retreat, others emphasise the continued primacy of state power in manipulating old and new institutional arenas, still other scholars anticipate the “rearticulation” of the state to partake in new governance.

This study is one of the first to examine theoretically and empirically, using a sample of some 230 partnerships, how domestic capacity, the constituencies of transnational actors, as well as international donors and institutions shape the variable rearticulation of the state to partake in partnerships. A comparative case study of Brazil and Russia provides further detail on the political dynamics that enable or constrain state-society collaborations for the environment.

The SNIS International Geneva Award 2014 will be distributed at an event held this spring in collaboration with UNITAR. Each winning author will receive a sum of CHF 5000.

Reference: Andonova, Liliana. 2014. “Boomerangs to Partnerships? Explaining State Participation in Transnational Partnerships for Sustainability”. Comparative Political Studies 47(3): 481– 515.

Full text available at cps.sagepub.com/content/47/3/481