Dr. Julia Teebken

In January 2026, I joined the Leibniz-IRS as a postdoctoral research associate and am working in the research group "Politics and Planning”.

My research focuses on the political dimension of uneven vulnerability to climate change and the politics of adaptation benefits. As part of this work, I comparatively explore the causes of uneven human vulnerability to climate change and climate adaptation responses across different political systems, governance levels (government, non-state, society) and geographic scales (local, regional, national). I am interested in learning, where political institutions and people already adapt, and where systemic, path-dependent factors (lock-ins) sustain uneven vulnerability to climate change. Thereby, I contribute conceptually and empirically to discourses on transformative adaptation.

Empirically, I have been working over a decade on the politics of human vulnerability and adaptation in China, the United States, Germany and the EU. Methodologically, I have applied mixed methods research designs but have a stronger focus on qualitative social science research and critical policy analysis. Over the past years, I have begun exploring and applying historical materialist policy analysis to different political systems and levels. Critical and comparative political economy research provide the foundations of this work.

My research aims to contribute to a better understanding of the opportunities and limitations of different political systems to address the root causes of vulnerability, which relate to classic inequality and social stratification questions. I wish to unveil the black box of policy processes and responsibilities that is often implicit in climate justice dominant discourses on “vulnerable populations”. Through my research, I have come to question mainstream social vulnerability approaches that focus on descriptive variables and single out individual, socio-economic and demographic characteristics that render people vulnerable. I find that these explanatory attempts are more often incomplete, problematic and lack a deeper understanding of the structural origins of and various forms of marginalization, that are actively reproduced as part of the dominant political economic orders (capitalism). Therefore, I argue for vulnerable political institutions.

Before joining the Leibniz Institute, I was s a postdoc (research and teaching) at the Chair of Human-Environment Relations, at the Department of Geography, Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Munich (2023-2025). I taught classes on the social dimensions of climate change, adaptation and policymaking, land use and land use conflicts, scientific methods and tools for sustainability assessments, and pathways towards socio-ecological transformation. Since 2023, I have been doing excursions on urban climate adaptation, inequality crises and urban planning.  I am an advisor on select thesis projects (B.A. and M.A.).

From 2022 to 2023, I was a postdoc at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) and the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China Studies at Princeton University. From 2018 to 2022, I worked as a research associate at the Environmental Policy Research Center (ffu), at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Freie Universität Berlin. Here, I worked in various policy consultancy projects (EU, BMBF, BMUV, UBA). My work here focused on the social dimensions of environmental policy, policy impact assessment, and transformative environmental politics.

I studied China Studies with a minor in Political Science (B.A.) at Freie Universität Berlin (2008-2012), Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs (M.A.) with a focus on climate change ethics at American University in Washington, D.C. (2013-2015), and subsequently earned my doctorate at the Department of Political and Social Sciences (PhD) at Freie Universität (2015-2020). In my doctoral thesis, I compared local climate adaptation and urban development policies in China (Jinhua, Zhejiang) and the USA (Atlanta, Georgia). I examined how institutional arrangements reproduce or reduce social vulnerability and which path-dependent structures (lock-ins) block transformative adaptation.