Research
The politics of sea level rise adaptation on the California coast
As sea levels rise, cities and counties are making choices about how to adapt. Without a focus on equity and environmental justice, those choices will potentially have negative long-term consequences: public subsidies for expensive adaptations that disproportionately benefit a small subset of property owners, the enclosure of public space to preserve private interests, and further disruption of coastal ecosystems, among other effects.
My dissertation leverages the case of California—where, over the last decade, officials have led a statewide sea level rise planning effort that, while limited in scope by many measures, likely represents the most comprehensive attempt to plan for SLR vulnerability in U.S. history—to analyze patterns and variation in the local politics of adaptation. Drawing on over 50 interviews with state officials, mayors, city councilmembers, senior planners, local residents, and other key decisionmakers; three years of ethnographic observation at key state-level and local planning meetings; and unique public comment datasets that link political behavior to individual-level administrative data, I ask questions such as: Who has power in local sea level rise adaptation planning processes and what shapes their political behavior? Facing backlash from residents and the real estate industry, how do local officials make decisions about continuing adaptation work, and why do choices vary?
My dissertation project will contribute to core questions in political and environmental sociology—how democracy and expertise interact in the climate crisis, the politics of property and homeownership in the face of climate threats—while also bringing sociological insight to interdisciplinary research on how to enact climate adaptation rooted in justice.
Publications:
(Under Review) Malmuth, Andrew. 2025. “Does local backlash hobble long-term planning for sea level rise? Evidence from California.”
(In Progress) Malmuth, Andrew. 2025. “Retreat Backlash: An Anatomy of Privilege, Participation, and Mistrust During Sea Level Rise Planning on the California Coast.”
U.S. states and the preemption of building decarbonization
Building electrification is a key piece of broader decarbonization—a necessary step to eliminate fossil fuels and mitigate climate change. While building decarbonization has gained traction in many cities around the world, a counter-movement has emerged at the state level in the U.S.: since 2020, more than half of U.S. states have passed laws preempting municipalities from restricting utilities, effectively shielding the natural gas industry from all-electric building requirements.
In an ongoing project with Edward Walker, we investigate the dynamics that led to bill passage and diffusion across U.S. states. In our first paper, using a plagiarism-detection tool, we found strong evidence of text similarity and potential information sharing across states. We also show that states passing preemption were not only more Republican but more ideologically conservative, typically featuring less professionalized state legislatures. We also examine qualitative evidence of the natural gas industry’s lobbying, showing that industry groups claimed influence over key bills (supported largely by Republican legislators).
Publications:
Walker, Edward T., and Andrew Malmuth. 2024. “The Natural Gas Industry, the Republican Party, and State Preemption of Local Building Decarbonization.” Npj Climate Action 98(3). doi:10.1038/s44168-024-00176-4.
The socio-legal dimensions of property on an eroding coast
Sociologists have long investigated how the fictitious commodity of land is privatized and converted from a public commons into a private good for sale in the marketplace. But what happens when, through changes in the environment, land that is legally codified as public encroaches on and circumscribes the private? As sea levels rise, public trust lands on the California coast are increasingly subsuming private property, testing long-standing legal frameworks that recognize the right for property boundaries to ambulate as water levels rise and fall. Bridging environmental sociology and the sociology of law, this ongoing project investigates the extent to which small-scale, property-level legal battles may be changing the strength of public trust protections, an endogenous process potentially shaped more by the demands of coastal real estate markets than the intention of public trust law. Research on the endogeneity of law has shown how organizations regulated by statutes can devise their own interpretation of broad legal doctrine that then becomes affirmed through the court system. I hope to extend these theories to consider potential changes in environmental protections as climate change further strains the already contentious and socially-mediated boundary between public and private space.
Publications:
Malmuth, Andrew. 2025. “Property and Permanence.” Places Journal. doi:10.22269/250520.