Winner of this year's Wildenmann Prize announced

The winner of the 2016 Wildenmann Prize is Viviane Gravey from Queen’s University Belfast.

Her prizewinning Paper Environmental Policy Dismantling in the EU: Disintegration by Stealth or Saviour of Integration? was presented at last year's Joint Sessions of Workshops in Pisa.

Viviane’s Paper aims to ascertain whether the environmental ambition of the EU is being reduced and, if that is the case, which forces are driving this change.

Her focus is on 'policy dismantling', a process that has so far been widely analysed, but mainly at domestic level and often only in relation to redistributive policies.

She puts forward an analytical framework, adapted from Bauer & Knill’s model for the analysis of domestic dismantling, and applies it to the analysis of dismantling at EU level by taking into account its consensual, multi-level and also contested nature.

This adapted framework is subsequently applied to three cases studies of environmental policy-dismantling in the EU, allowing the author to see clearly which actors have been using which strategies – and what effects this has produced.

Viviane also shows how efforts of policy dismantling in the EU are interconnected with the broader debate on the future forms and degree of European integration.

Our Jury's verdict

Viviane’s Paper offers an excellent example of careful theoretical reasoning, combined with solid empirical research and intelligent model-building.

   @VGravey

Prize Jury

Kris Deschouwer – Chair, and member of the ECPR Executive Committee
Birgit Sauer, Reuven Hazan & Anna Sroka – members of the ECPR Executive Committee
Cas Mudde – Co-Editor of the European Journal of Political Research

Papers shortlisted for the 2016 Wildenmann Prize

Eliza Garnsey University of Cambridge
The Cultural Diplomacy of Transitional Justice South Africa's 'Imaginary Fact' at the Venice Biennale

Maria-Alina Asavei Charles University in Prague
The Art and Politics of Imagination: Remembering Mass Violence against Women

Marcel Hanegraaff University of Antwerp 
Informational Demand Across the Globe: Towards a Comparative Understanding of Information Exchange

Andreas Hofmann University of Gothenburg 
Can EU Environmental Policy be left to Judges and the Market? On the Prospects for Enforcing Environmental Law in Europe

Andreas Schäfer Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 
Comparing Democratising Functions of Deliberation in Parliaments

Honorata Mazepus Universiteit Leiden 
What Makes Political Authority Legitimate? An Analysis of Ideas about Legitimacy in The Netherlands, France, Poland, Ukraine, Russia and China

Alexander Dukalskis University College Dublin 
Communist Rule in a Post-Communist World: Legitimation Strategies and Paths to Authoritarian Survival

Jesse van Amelsvoort Rijksuniversiteit Groningen 
Acting Out of View of the Public: On the idea of Homely Citizenship

Terri-Anne Teo Nanyang Technological University
Multicultural Citizenship and its Exclusions: Examining Singapore's Little India Riot

Nir Barak Hebrew University of Jerusalem 
Reasessing Environmentalism: Towards an Environmental Political Theory of the City

Anne Fremaux Queen's University Belfast 
The Return of Nature in the Anthropocene

Keywords: Environmental Policy, European Union