Many congratulations – Professor of Political Science wins top award for research on roots and configurations of global climate politics

Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Federica Genovese, is a 2024 winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize. 

The Phillip Leverhulme Prize is aimed at researchers at an early stage of their careers whose work has had international impact and whose future research career is exceptionally promising. 

Professor Genovese is one among the first political scientists to push for a distributional understanding of the conflict that societies are experiencing around climate mitigation and adaptation policies. 

Her research encompasses various levels of political action, combining the study of international climate negotiations with the mapping of local level attitudes among the public but also organisations. Her work leverages administrative, institutional, and behavioural data, and her observational and experimental analyses have focused on Global North as well as Global South countries. 

Receiving the prize, Federica, said: 

I am beyond honoured to win the Philip Leverhulme Prize. I thank my mentors, co-authors, colleagues, and family for championing me and encouraging me to explore research questions freely and ambitiously I am passionate about. 

The prize will allow me to expand my research on the subnational politics and political economy of climate vulnerability. I am very excited that the Trust has chosen me to push this line of research.”

Commenting on the news, DPIR's Head of Department David Doyle said:

This is absolutely wonderful news. I am delighted to congratulate Federica on this hugely-deserved and prestigious prize”.

We spoke to Federica who shared her story: 

What motivated you to conduct this research and what were your expectations?

I was born and raised in Sicily, a canary in the coal mine when it comes to weather events as well as the social conflict around fossil fuels and environmental degradation. As a teenager, I heard about the greenhouse gas effect, but I did not have the tools to grasp its connection with politics. It was only when I started my first university degree in Canada and took classes in politics and international relations that I understood that climate change was about to overwhelm political institutions and communities around the world. So, I took my first class in environmental politics in my first year of university, continued this focus in post-graduate studies, and then wrote a PhD thesis on international climate politics, focusing specifically on international climate negotiations. 

This research formed my prior that much about the international disagreements around climate change are based on hardcore distributional cleavages at the root of society, so often within domestic boundaries.  

What did you learn?

Throughout my PhD years research and then in more recent work, I learned a few things. Firstly, my empirical work has shown how climate change is at the same time a (re)incarnation of social class conflict as well as a deep identity issue. Along these lines, my research distinctly shows that climate motivated political battles divide society on both material and non-material lines, and that climate change policy needs to be designed in ways that tailor the geographical distribution of climate interests in each territory. 

Additionally, some of my research on firms has shown that industrial interests are very compact around climate change, and that the only ways to shake the dreadful, low-bar status quo on climate policy is to take advantage of crises (i.e., “windows of opportunity”).

What do you hope your research will lead to? 

I hope that, together with the interventions of many other excellent political science researchers working on climate change and environmental issues, my research can crystalise the political challenges and opportunities to push forward with bold climate action. We are at a critical point in society’s fight against climate change and I am hoping that my work nudges people to remember that the world has the technical solutions but still needs to fight the political battle. 

I hope this Prize will provide further visibility to my research agenda, not only among researchers but also among policymakers and other stakeholders. I also hope that climate change will be soon investigated and taught as a central theme of political science everywhere.

Professor Genovese will use the prize money towards investigating the politics of geolocated firms exposed to costly climate policy adoption and climate change-induced asset erosion. She will conduct detailed research into how firms that are exposed to these climate risks mobilize for or against climate policy, collecting data from various European countries as well as emerging economies.