ABSTRACT
Much research into sustainability uses case studies for its empirical foundation. In attempting to understand how human practice affects the environment, researchers often look to individual cases or initiatives to explore consequences, possibilities and potentialities which result from particular social practices and their relationships with outcomes in the environment; an environment defined both physically and socially. Given the broad range of practices, phenomena and initiatives that can contribute to our understanding of sustainability practice, there is a need to use a formal research methodology which can encompass a wide variety of data from a wide variety of sources and disciplines. Very often a piece of sustainability research will use multiple methods – by methods here I mean ‘research tools’ – as appropriate. Each method will be rooted in a firm methodological tradition, but these traditions have usually arisen within specific research disciplines. Sustainability research needs to combine these different tools with their different methodological roots into single study that employs equal measures of methodological rigour as the foundations which underpin each individual tool. In this chapter, I assert that one key way of doing this is to use the case study method with its formal rigour and design.
