Applying a Multi-pronged Approach to Assessing Adaptive Capacity - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 74

to good effect in comparative qualitative analysis in social science (Ragin 1987 ) ,
but instead to press the relevance of qualitative techniques in order to make sense of
the complex nature of social phenomena that offer more positivist approaches to
understanding a system's behaviour (Miles and Huberman 1994 ) . Furthermore, it
was decided not to employ quantitative techniques of data analysis on the qualitative
data, to avoid adding more layers of interpretation to the data, and from that assigning
quantitative meaning to biased data (Gibbs 2008 ) .
The research questions posed and fields of study encapsulated in this topic are
focussed on the assessment and understanding of complex and multi-scale gover-
nance systems, which are not only characterised by a set of internal dynamics (e.g.
actor networks, institutions at multiple scales) but also by the external dynamics
(environmental change, climate change, socio-economic turbulence). Analysing
these dynamics is challenging and calls for a more interdisciplinary approach to
resource governance research and the underpinning conceptual frameworks
employed, to be better able to take into account complex and context dependent
dynamics of governance regimes (Ostrom 2008 in Pahl-Wostl 2009 ; Young 2007 ) .
Furthermore, social and biophysical scientists working on the urgent real world
problems concerning environmental and climate related challenges are increasingly
expected to develop knowledge that is context driven, problem focussed and inter-
disciplinary, by working collaboratively across stakeholder groups (Dovers 2005 in
Aslin and Blackstock 2010 ). In this 'post disciplinary' world, scientists are being
increasingly called upon to produce policy relevant (if not prescriptive) research
(Aslin and Blackstock 2010 ), which in turn requires a broader mix of disciplines to
match real world contexts and challenges.
Human-environment interactions have been characterised by a number of disci-
plines (including complex adaptive systems theory), by problems that are fundamen-
tally systemic, multifaceted, complex, broad and 'wicked' (Rittel and Webber 1973 )
and thus require a mix of disciplines to better frame, understand, analyse and relate the
problems under investigation, all this requiring input from a range of social and bio-
physical sciences (Aslin and Blackstock 2010 ) . Inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches
to problem oriented research questions, such as climate change, global environmental
change and adaptation, allow the researcher to better account for and tackle complex-
ity of science, fragmentation of knowledge and transcendence of different traditional
disciplines engendered by the nature of the problem itself (Lawrence 2010 ) .
Therefore, drawing on resilience-based literature, governance theory and climate
change science, this topic presents an interdisciplinary methodological approach,
within the context of the ACQWA project, to better understand the problems and
challenges in developing and mobilising adaptive capacity across highly contrasting
governance regimes. Furthermore, a bottom up (inductive) and top down (deductive)
approach has been combined to generate context sensitive analysis that is not speci fi c
and non-transferable (Pahl-Wostl 2009 ) in order to overcome the challenge of
scaling up adaptation research (Smit and Wandel 2006 ) and develop both aggre-
gate regional and national findings, as well as community specific findings. This
approach takes advantage of and integrates different forms of hard and soft knowl-
edge (local, scientific, specialised knowledge) identifies what can practically be