Interpretive Methodologies, Quantitative Methods, and Comparative Environmental Politics
This chapter argues for a broader and more creative understanding of the relationship between methods and epistemology in the study of comparative environmental politics. Quantitative methods tend to be associated with comparative inferential questions while interpretive questions tend to be associated with qualitative methods. This chapter argues against these associations. The chapter begins by fleshing out the argument against assumed methodological associations. It identifies the use of quantitative methods in interpretive research as the biggest lacuna in the methodological playing field of comparative environmental politics. It then presents two examples of how to use quantitative methods effectively in interpretive research, without embedding those methods in an epistemological positivism with which they are generally associated. The first of these cases, based on dissertation research by Saskia van Wees, looks at the different patterns of environmental performance and environmental foreign policy in India and China in the period 2002–2012. The second case looks at efforts by Indigenous and traditional communities in Brazil’s Amazon Basin to oppose the construction of dams that would impact their communities.