My current major research project is focused on coastal adaptation to sea level rise on the California coast. My dissertation, Retreat Backlash: The Politics of Sea Level Rise Adaptation on the California Coast, draws on 50+ interviews with adaptation stakeholders, an ethnography of climate policymaking settings, and a novel dataset of public comments made during coastal adaptation planning meetings to make three, interconnected contributions.

First, I challenge assumptions about how homeownership and wealth impede effective, long-term coastal adaptation policy in developed urban areas. Drawing on public comment data from five years of sea level rise planning in a flood-threatened California city, I use a mixed-methods approach to show that homeowners with the most to lose financially were not necessarily the ones who mobilized to obstruct and dismantle coastal adaptation efforts; rather, embedded social networks and information sharing amongst peers was more often responsible, over and above structural factors, for engendering deep mistrust and impeding effective participatory planning. This work was recently presented during the Climate Change regular session at the 2025 American Sociological Association (ASA) Conference.

Second, drawing on a study of four coastal cities in California facing comparable environmental hazards and social and political contexts, I show that structural theories for explaining coastal adaptation policy outcomes, while vital for macro analyses, are ill-equipped to capture subtle but highly consequential variation in local policy approaches. I argue that theorizing the institutional logics of coastal adaptation offers an important heuristic for explaining why local officials facing similar challenges may choose to focus on hardening the coastline using seawalls rather than designing long-term policy frameworks.

Finally, I trace the political and environmental history of property boundaries along the California coast to show that current policy frameworks cannot ensure equitable outcomes in the context of climate change. Showing how coastlines are physically disappearing in California, threatening the public’s right to the coast, I make a case for equitable coastal policy that addresses the exclusion of voices from tribal nations, environmental justice communities, and working-class coastal residents.

Publications:

(In Progress) Malmuth, Andrew. 2026. “‘A Difference in Emphasis’: Tracing the Institutional Logics of Municipal Coastal Adaptation.”

(In Progress) Malmuth, Andrew. 2026. “Retreat Backlash: An Anatomy of Privilege, Participation, and Mistrust During Sea Level Rise Planning on the California Coast.”

Malmuth, Andrew. 2025. “Property and Permanence.” Places Journal. doi:10.22269/250520.