New Water Policy and Practice Volume 1, Number 1 - Fall 2014 | Page 48

New Water Policy and Practice

consider two suggestions for moving forward. One is the beginnings of a standard
format for describing methods. The second
is a way around the problem of long-windedness and clunky-ness.

Developing a standard format could
start by asking authors to ensure they address
the following five questions when they describe their methods. Each question would
be asked both of the process of increasing
understanding of the problem and of what
happened when the researchers tried to influence policy and/or practice change.

the research and research implementation occurred, such as the political,
economic, or historical context, any
factors which worked for or against
giving their research and research implementation legitimacy, and any institutional facilitators or barriers to the
research or research implementation.
5. How well did the methods chosen
work? This involves reflection on and
evaluation of all the choices made in
answering the previous four questions,
for example, would a different systems
approach have been more useful, what
were the strengths and weaknesses of
the dialogue method chosen, was the
research helped by unrecognised contextual factors?

1. What were the research and research
implementation aiming to achieve and
who were the intended beneficiaries?
2. What were the relevant ‘components’
(e.g. types of knowledge or groups targeted to influence change) and how
were they chosen? This question includes:
• The systems view taken of the research problem and of the policy/
practice areas
• The way they were scoped and
boundaries set in deciding what to
do and who to try to influence
• The way issues were framed
• How values, particularly conflicting values, were taken into account
• How collaborations were managed.
3. How were the research and research
implementation undertaken? For example, how were various kinds of
knowledge brought together and how
was influence exerted on policy/practice change? This involves describing
methods for dialogue, modeling, communication, advocacy, engagement,
and so on.
4.
Were any contextual factors relevant? Here authors would reflect on the
‘big picture’ circumstances in which

For more details, see Bammer (2013).

In time, as ways of thinking about
and describing methods become more sophisticated, documenting processes at this
level of detail will warrant journal articles of
their own. In the meantime, NWPP Journal
could copy the journal Science by making
available an on-line ‘additional materials’
section, where messier processes and less
straight-forward methods are described in
detail. This section would be included in the
peer-review. It could also be open for reader comment. Interaction between reviewers,
readers and authors could lead to productive ways of enhancing methods and methods description.

Reference
Bammer, G. 2013. Disciplining Interdisciplinarity: Integration and Implementation Sciences for Researching Complex Real-World
Problems. ANU E-Press. http://press.anu.
edu.au?p=222171.
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