FRACTAL aims to blend a variety of knowledge types to co-produce relevant and significant climate knowledge in African CiTies, including academic and practitioner. This page provides resources for approaches and methods that have been applied within FRACTAL to undertake research, either within across or outside traditional disciplines.
Decision making & governance work
Discourse Analysis as a method for understanding the framing of urban governance. Discourse analysis is an analytical approach applied by social scientists as part of the FRACTAL urban governance research, and includes both analysis of verbal engagements and analysis of policies and related documents. In practical terms, this implies unpacking how language is used, when people speak as well as in documents, in order to better understand how problems and solutions are framed. Such insights build an understanding of current planning and implementation patterns, with the aim of enhancing the integration of climate information into decision making. This briefing note is an introduction into the definition and method of discourse analysis, with particular focus on argumentative discourse analysis, and outlines its application as a method to better understand urban governance within the FRACTAL focal cities