Dr Alex Sadler is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Essex, working on the Advancing Resilience and Innovation for a Sustainable Environment (ARISE) project.
Tell us about your current role and project
I am a Senior Research Officer on the Advancing Resilience and Innovation for a Sustainable Environment (ARISE) project, based at the University of Essex in Colchester. The ARISE initiative aims to work with coastal communities across the southeast coast of England to support them in strengthening their resilience to a variety of interrelated environmental, social, and economic challenges.
What does your research focus on?
While I am helping out with a variety of initiatives across the project, my main focus is on implementing a policy network analysis. Specifically, I will be mapping and analysing the network of stakeholders involved with policymaking and governance related to coastal community resilience in four villages across Kent, Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk. This involves interviewing a variety of stakeholders from each community, including organisations from civil society and the public and private sectors, to try to understand how communities govern resilience, and how they are connected to broader networks of policymaking.
What excites you about this research?
What most excites me about this work is the opportunity to hear local perspectives about how communities are managing resilience in their local area, including the challenges they face and how they are overcoming them. During my initial visits to these villages, I’ve already seen some really exciting and creative approaches to addressing these complex challenges, so I am looking forward to learning more about this and hopefully reflecting these perspectives back to policymakers and other stakeholders. I am also really interested in gaining a deeper understanding of what policymaking and governance actually looks like in practice at the local level, especially for a topic as complex as resilience, which brings together a wide variety of stakeholders from across flood prevention and healthcare to building social connection and preserving cultural heritage, amongst other topics.
What did you do before joining ARISE?
I recently finished my PhD at the University of Edinburgh, where my research focused on exploring the strengths and challenges of markets for sustainably produced food in India. Outside of my thesis, I also worked as a consultant on sustainable public finance and climate policy, with a focus on climate adaptation and resilience, so I am excited to delve further into the topic of resilience as part of ARISE. My academic background is a mixture of economics, environmental studies, and development studies, so I am loving being part of an interdisciplinary team on the ARISE project, which brings together researchers from the social sciences, natural sciences, and the arts.
How have you benefited from being part of Coast-R?
I had the opportunity to attend the Coast-R conference in Liverpool earlier this year – it was my first time visiting the city and I absolutely loved it! I learned so much from the presentations and from meeting other researchers and practitioners working in this space, and felt very inspired to forge new connections and explore new avenues in my research. I also met a few people that have helped me to make connections for my policy network analysis interviews, which was incredibly helpful. I hope to continue to meet other researchers, policymakers, and practitioners working on the topic of community resilience – particularly the policy and governance angle – so would love to chat with anyone in the Coast-R network who also has an interest in this!
