Gül Tuçaltan is an urban planner and governance practitioner with a doctorate in urban and infrastructure policy from Utrecht University (2017). Over fifteen years of work across Europe, Turkey, Africa, and the Netherlands she has built a practice at the intersection of local governance, climate adaptation, and knowledge co-production: the combination that Perspektief.org requires.
She has worked with and alongside local governments, UN agencies, international research institutions, and civil society organisations across very different institutional and political contexts. What has stayed constant is a commitment to connecting the knowledge held by communities, practitioners, and researchers into governance processes designed to produce durable rather than technically compliant outcomes.
Most recently she has worked as Knowledge Partnerships Manager at the Global Center on Adaptation in the Netherlands, and before that led the GCA Research for Impact Center. She developed the Climate Adaptation Changemakers School, a peer-learning programme connecting government actors, academics, and practitioners from Kenya, Senegal, Uganda, The Gambia, and the Netherlands with Dutch water boards and provinces. Prior to GCA she coordinated the Knowledge for Policy component of the RESLOG project in Turkey, supporting municipalities under governance pressures from mass migration, a programme recognised by UNHCR as an exemplary good practice. She maintains an active research and teaching profile through the Urban Morphosis Lab at Darmstadt University of Technology, publishing on metropolitan governance, climate adaptation, and urban resilience. Earlier in her career she worked with UNIDO, the World Bank, and the Regional Environmental Center-Turkey on environmental management programmes under the Montreal Protocol, EU-IPA, and Erasmus Mundus.
"The problem is not a lack of data or technical capacity. It is that governance processes are not designed to integrate the full landscape of actors and knowledge that any durable decision requires. That is the gap Perspektief.org closes."
Perspektief.org emerges from a career spent watching technically excellent plans fail in implementation: not because the plans were wrong, but because the political terrain was never mapped, the durability of decisions was never honestly assessed, and the consensus required to make change hold was assumed rather than built. This pattern is consistent across every domain and every country. It is not inevitable. Building the organisation that addresses it is the logical next step.