This book brings a new angle to the study of transnational advocacy networks (TANs) by making local choices, priorities, and outcomes the central focus of its analysis. TANs link actors at local, national, and international levels in campaigns across national boundaries. As Maria Guadalupe Moag Rodrigues points out, most such studies have focused on the campaigns' impacts on governmental policies or on public opinion. Her focus is on a network's influence on a part of itself instead. Are local participants empowered by TANs to formulate their own autonomous conceptions of sustainable development and to gain institutionalized mechanisms to articulate those? To answer these questions, a focus on the internal dynamics of politics, resources, cohesion, and legitimacy in the network becomes central. This is not a wholly new approach and is actually quite common in other fields, but does represent a departure from many studies of similar phenomena in political science. Rodrigues argues that it is especially important to look at the impact on local network members because that is central for local outcomes.

The author concludes that local participants are often not empowered by their participation in TANs. They might be temporarily empowered, but then frequently lose ground through ensuing political backlash or through their lack of capacity to fill new political spaces that the network conquers for them. This means that even apparently successful TANs may be unable to secure lasting sustainable development of a kind envisioned by their local participants. These outcomes are especially likely given that participants in the networks have had only partially overlapping priorities, strategies, and time frames in all the cases Rodrigues discusses.

These conclusions are based on case studies of a series of transnational environmental advocacy campaigns in three countries, Brazil, Ecuador, and India. The strength of this book is in the fine-grained analysis it provides of the workings especially of the Rondônia network over a long time period. Because of their focus on international and national impacts, many of the existing studies of TANs concentrate on the comparatively short time spans of intense nonlocal participation. When the nonlocal activists move on, so do the analysts. As Rodrigues shows, local actors do not ever “move on” in the same ways as their partners may. The willingness of local activists who oppose the Narmada River dams in India to pledge suicide by drowning if their villages are flooded is a stark illustration (p. 122). The book also does a good job at showing the varied and often opposing preferences of local actors. The advocacy coalitions may help bridge these differences by providing a forum in which to discuss them, but may also displace local actors.

While the title Global Environmentalism and Local Politics implies that the three countries are given equal weight in the study, half the book actually focuses on one Brazilian case study involving a network focused on the World Bank project Planafloro in the state of Rondônia. This is the only included case study that makes an effort to place the particular advocacy network in a wider set of policies and is the one based on the most extensive field research. The Ecuadoran and Indian cases serve primarily as foils to the story of the Planafloro network and occupy an ambiguous analytical status with respect to it. In the absence of much explicit discussion of why these cases were chosen, and given that they simply confirm—with nuances—the conclusions of the Rondônian case, they add more detail than real analytical insight to the argument. Thus, the three cases together do offer solid evidence that TANs have negative as well as positive impacts on locally defined sustainable development, but the lack of strong variation in outcomes makes it difficult to understand when and why this will be the case. The final chapter makes an effort to set the cases against each other comparatively, and identifies a plausible set of lessons for formulating networks that produce outcomes that are more desirable from a local point of view. Given the frequently acknowledged additional points of view and priorities in most TANs, however, these lessons are more likely to be a guide for understanding some of the ongoing difficulties with such networks than to be a clear formulation for overcoming them.

While these case studies improve on many studies of TANs by lengthening the time frame considered, one problem replicated in this book is a failure to place specific transnational campaigns more fully in the context of national environmental politics. I focus my comments here on the Brazilian case, as it is the one that makes the greatest claim to placing a specific transnational campaign in a wider national context. A 12-page chapter on the dilemmas of Amazonian development provides a brief introduction to some of the relevant actors, ideas, and policy but is not then linked to the following chapters. More problematically, the chapters on the Rondônia case raise a number of issues that have analogues elsewhere in Brazil, which might help to explain why they appear as they do in Rondônia or would help to isolate some of the specificities of the Rondônian local situation. The superficially similar and much more successful experiences of neighboring Acre State, for example, are barely mentioned, although they certainly shaped the expectations of participants about how the network might work in Rondônia. Ecological-economic zoning of the Amazon was a national policy throughout the 1990s, not just a piece of the World Bank's Planafloro project. In one final example, the Rondônia Forum was created at a time when state-level socioenvironmental forums were being created all over Brazil as it prepared to host the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. The fact that the Rondônia Forum faced internationally rather than toward the national preparatory process might help explain the curious lack of connection to national environmental organizations that Rodrigues sees as one cause of the Rondônia Forum's problems.