Designing Sustainability Research

Research projects in sustainability are complex and transcend the boundaries of conventional disciplines such as economics, international relations, and sociology. Sustainability and carbon issues affect and interact with monetary stability, industrial policy, and more; comprise different analytical foci, including human behavior, politics, and power conflicts; and operate across multiple units of analysis such as individuals, groups, organizations, states, and relationships between states. Research designs must integrate distinct components coherently and logically to adequately capture this multidimensionality. A good research project has both good ideas and good design. While good ideas can be hard to pin down, a longstanding set of rules and design principles can help us turn compelling ideas into excellent research. Good design makes ideas more accessible, persuasive, and likely to achieve their aims. This course provides students with the fundamental principles for designing research projects in the sustainability field, including how to link empirical data to concepts, concepts to theory, and theory to research strategy. This includes articulating a problem, question, or research puzzle and providing a rationale for it; reviewing the relevant literature; advancing a hypothesis or argument; constructing a theoretical framework; defining concepts, variables, and relationships; and designing a test of the hypothesis or argument. Once students learn the principles of research design, their reading and comprehension of even the densest academic writing will improve. When one knows what to expect from the research design of an article, report, or book one is better able to distinguish the argument from the evidence, the logic from the information, and the normative issues (that is, what should be done) from underlying and wider practical and theoretical implications. We explore current issues in sustainability research through a number of cases that bring the full array of research design, including cross-sectional, longitudinal, and comparative designs. The particular order in which these designs are introduced throughout the course follows a cumulative rationale (that is, starting with most descriptive designs to most deductive designs). While the methodological focus is on qualitative approaches, we also look at nested designs, deploying qualitative and quantitative analytical tools simultaneously. This involves hands-on practice. By drafting a research design for a sustainability project, justifying their strategy, and examining their work for potential flaws, students' research critical thinking improves. At the same time, students gain further insights through peer and diagnostic review processes and illustrations of common research designs in sustainability studies.