Phone: 301.405.1770
Office: 3117H Chincoteague
Email: jhadden1 at umd•edu
Curriculum
Vitae
Jennifer Hadden received her Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University in 2011. Her research focuses on the role of civil society participation in climate change policy-making in the European Union and the United Nations. This work has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship to the European Union, as well as by grants from the European Union Studies Association and the Cornell Institute for a Sustainable Future.
Her research and teaching interests include climate change and environmental politics, social movements and non-governmental organizations, European politics and integration, transnational politics, social network analysis and qualitative research methods.
Jennifer Hadden’s research examines the role of civil society participation in transnational climate change politics. Her current book project is a comparative study of the network of civil society actors working on climate change politics in the European Union and the United Nations, from 2007-2009. She asks, first, how civil society organizations make decisions about what forms of collective action they will use to try to influence their targets, and second, what consequences their decisions have for climate change policy-making.
Hadden argues that organizational strategic decision-making is fundamentally relational. This means that an organization’s choice to employ a particular tactic – broadly conceived of as a choice to use an ‘insider’ or an ‘outsider’ strategy vis-à-vis institutional politics – partially depends on the decisions of the other organizations with which it is connected. In particular, she demonstrates that the highly contentious ‘outsider’ protest strategy spreads among closely connected organizations in the build up to the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. This is because organizations share information and resources with one another, and because organizations are influenced by the decisions of other organizations. She also suggests that understanding the relationship between conventional ‘insiders’ and contentious ‘outsiders’ is important in evaluating the consequences of civil society activism for climate change policy.
She has a longstanding interest in transnational social movements and non-governmental organizations, and has previously conducted research on anti-neoliberal protest and the politics of the global justice movement in the United States and Europe, as well as the American and transnational dimensions of peace activism.
