The Leonard D. White Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best doctoral dissertation in the field of public administration.
Citation from the Award Committee:
The Leonard D. White Award Committee has selected “Environmental NGOs Political Engagement in China” for the Leonard D. White Award honoring the best dissertation in public administration. This dissertation provides a framework for understanding how environmental NGOs in China navigate changes to public charity laws following the passage of China’s 2016 Charity Law and Overseas NGO Management Law, both of which fundamentally altered the political environment for China’s environmental NGOs. These legal changes ultimately had the effect of making environmental NGOs more subject to governmental control and oversight. Given that much of the literature on civil society in non-democratic settings emphasizes either the complete repression of NGOs or puts forth the idea that the presence of NGOs ultimately leads to civil society’s transformation toward more democratic practices, this dissertation shows that, in China, environmental NGOs followed different adaptation processes to remain in good standing with the Chinese government and these the adaptation strategies differed widely cross regional and local contexts.
Using a combination of a systematic literature review, fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, and computational text analysis, this dissertation offers a novel approach to analyzing how NGOs respond to changes in law, thereby advancing our understanding of organizational life cycle theory. It also provides new ways to analyze the effects of new legal restrictions on the organizational structure, operational focus, and digital communication strategies employed by registered environmental NGOs in China, and it calibrates our understanding of how non-governmental organizations build, retain, or lose political capital in the process. The dissertation’s conclusion highlights the effect of non-Western governments’ use of “graduated incorporation” strategies to integrate favored organizations while limiting others, showing that differentiated regulation, administrative fragmentation, and regional variation at the provincial level matter to NGO adaptation strategies. The author’s theoretical contributions have broad applicability to other non-Western contexts and prompt serious consideration of updating simplistic theoretical binary frameworks of autonomy vs. control on non-governmental organizations in non-democratic settings.
Lin Xu is a political scientist whose research focuses on public and nonprofit management, civic engagement, and state–society relations in China. She earned her Ph.D. in Public Administration from The University of Hong Kong in 2025. Her training spans political science, public administration, and global political economy. She holds an M.S.S. in Global Political Economy from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and a B.A. in German from Beijing Foreign Studies University. She translated Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia into Chinese, published by World Affairs Press in 2026. Her interdisciplinary background informs a research approach grounded in theory and empirical analysis.
Her dissertation, Environmental NGOs’ Political Engagement in China, examines how environmental organizations navigate changing regulations while sustaining public participation. Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and organizational analysis, the project analyzes strategies of adaptation, coalition building, and narrative framing. It contributes to scholarship on third-sector engagement in contemporary China.
Lin’s broader research explores interactions between civil society organizations and political institutions, focusing on volunteer participation, accountability practices, and organizational strategy. She also studies civil society involvement in the Green Belt and Road Initiative, analyzing how environmental norms and governance practices travel across borders. She has presented her work at APSA, ASPA, IRSPM, etc. In 2026, she was named an ASPA Founders’ Fellow. In 2025, she was a Recognised Student in Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford and attended the Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models Summer Institute at the University of Michigan.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Davia Downey (Chair) of the University of Memphis, Jiaqi Liang of the University of Illinois, and Alan Zarychta of the University of Chicago