Setting the Stage: A Mixed Methods Research Design

Abstract

Now that we have provided the backdrop of our study—the international climate change negotiations—and embedded our research in the broader aid allocation literature, we can turn to the core of our study: the empirical analysis. We want to understand how donors distribute their adaptation-relevant development assistance: who receives support for climate change adaptation, and why? We address this question using both quantitative and qualitative research methods. On the one hand, we need quantitative methods to detect patterns in adaptation aid giving across all oecd dac donors and recipients—we examine adaptation aid flows from 28 donors to 141 recipients. On the other hand, we also need qualitative methods to understand the decision-making processes that drive the patterns detected by our quantitative analysis. The mix of methods also helps to compensate the weaknesses of the different methods, such as data limitations in quantitative datasets. We hence combine statistical analysis of oecd aid data with qualitative case studies of three large climate donors: Germany, Sweden, and the UK. We selected these three donors using a very different systems design, as Sect. 3.1 explains. Although Germany, Sweden, and the UK are all rather generous supporters of climate change adaptation, they differ in many other regards, such as their size, economic structure, or colonial history.