Vacancy: Senior Research Officer

Eastern Arc is recuiting a postdoctoral Senior Research Officer in the Department of Government at the University of Essex as part of the ARISE project, “Advancing Resilience and Innovation for a Sustainable Environment”. The deadline is 23 March 2025.

ARISE is a ground-breaking £3 million research initiative that studies how to develop resilience within coastal seas and communities, working with local stakeholders to design and test different ‘interventions’, or ways of tackling problems related to climate change, sea level rise, and environmental, political, and social threats. At the end of the project, we will have a powerful and practical toolkit that informs policy and public management scholars and practitioners on how to address the challenges facing our coasts, particularly those posed by the effects of climate change on the natural, human, and built environments.

The ARISE project is led by Professor Gina Yannitell Reinhardt, who will jointly supervise the postdoctoral research with Prof Philip Leifeld, based at the University of Manchester.

Duties of the Role

Your role in this project will be to study the policy networks enabling or hindering effective governance, community resilience, and implementation of place-based measures in the areas of climate adaptation, infrastructure, heritage and culture, health and wellbeing, public goods, and other issues affecting the resilience of local communities.

To this end, you will collect policy network and other relevant data, including through interviews with decision makers in several municipalities in the east of England, analyse these data, and contribute to, with the opportunity to lead on, academic publications in the areas of environmental policy and administration, political networks, environmental communication, and sustainability. Your work will also involve conceptual, theoretical, and empirical research on the drivers of resilience in coastal communities across issue areas.

Qualifications and Skills Required

We are looking for a candidate with a keen interest in environmental politics or policy and a PhD (or be in final stages of studies) in politics or another social science discipline or project-related disciplines, such as environmental science or STEM.

In addition, you will possess strong writing skills, data management skills, and experience with some methodological aspects of the project, such as network analysis, structured interviews, systems mapping, or statistical analysis.

This is a fixed-term, full-time research post until 30 August 2027 in line with the grant funding.

To find out more and apply, go to the application page here.