The UEP research group leader, Sirkku Juhola, was awarded a Research Council of Finland research grant in June 2025. The new project, titled Governing at the Limit: Managed retreat in climate change stressed cities (GOAL), will start in the latter half of the year and continue until 2029.
Prof Tatiana Filatova from the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands and Prof Lauren Rickards from La Trobe University in Melbourne are collaborating on the project.
The project focuses on understanding what governance means at the limits to adaptation in cities. The project examines these limits in the context of managed retreat, which is increasingly becoming an option for cities as habitability can no longer be guaranteed in existing locations.
Research literature has shown that most managed retreat programs often stagnate due to political and legal tensions. GOAL first identifies rules of behavior and decision-making procedures that may limit actors in society. This is achieved by analyzing policy instruments through computational methods. The results from topic modeling are used to develop typologies of rules of behavior in managed retreat, which are then incorporated into agent-based modeling.
Second, the governance system limits are examined in a qualitative comparative analysis of a global open-access database of managed retreat cases. The emerging framework is tested in a case study in Australia. After extensive validation, findings are communicated to policymakers.
The UEP group is currently advertising for a postdoctoral position within the GOAL project, see here: