It is my pleasure to engage in this critical dialogue with a scholar whose work I greatly admire. Fuentes-George’s comments on Networks in Contention offer intriguing directions for future research and raise pressing questions about the implications of this study. I am pleased to have the opportunity to respond to his comments and to thank him for his considered engagement with the themes of the book.

My first goal with this project was to develop a relational theory of how civil society organizations make strategic choices. My second goal was to present an account of how non-state actors have participated in global climate change politics. Fuentes-George raises two core questions in his review that touch on both of these topics.

First, he rightly notes that my study mainly examines how contentious tactics diffuse within the climate change advocacy network. He asks whether moderate tactics are equally “contagious,” and if so, whether actors could use relationships to try to moderate radical actors within advocacy networks. These are intriguing questions. Tracking the diffusion of contention made sense for my research design because few actors were employing this strategy at the outset of this study. Given the uncertainty surrounding the use of new tactics, I acknowledge that relational dynamics may have been especially important to my case. Future research could very usefully examine whether relational dynamics are as critical in the diffusion of established tactics, or whether an influx of moderates can in turn produce moderation within a network.

Second, Fuentes-George observes that the book manuscript presents “scientific” and “justice” frames as though they are categorically discrete. But this is not entirely the case. He is correct that I make this distinction in my coding and analysis, even though those actors adopting the “justice” frame certainly also embrace the scientific basis of climate science. However, I chose to emphasize this division because it was politically salient to actors during the time period of analysis. As I document in Chapters 2 and 5, justice framing constitutes an innovation in climate politics, emerging forcefully as a foundational theme for a new civil society coalition in 2007.

While the two frames are potentially compatible (p. 116), the climate justice frame implied quite a different set of policy prescriptions. To oversimplify, a traditional scientific framing would treat climate change as a global commons problem. A justice framing would emphasize climate change as an externality problem, with vastly different policy solutions. It was this dispute over policy solutions that contributed to network divisions during the time period I analyzed (p. 122), not a disagreement over the core of climate science.

The diffusion of frames and tactics I documented in this book has continued in subsequent years. Even major conservation groups have adopted the climate justice framing at UNFCCC meetings, and climate protests against fossil fuel projects have particularly expanded since the time of my study. As global climate governance shifts to a more bottom-up and decentralized form, and as the world struggles to implement the Paris Agreement, these trends suggest to me that civil society actors may increasingly adopt a role as informal monitors, attempting to punish those actors that shirk responsibility for action.