Knowledge,context and problemsheds: a critical realist method for interdisciplinary water studies

ABSTRACT

Understanding water issues as problemsheds addresses the narrowly water-centred framing of watershed and basin-focused water research and policy. In a critical realist approach problemshed also serves to identify the context-specificity of water knowledge, by navigating between the extremes of positivist generalization and interpretivist local specificity and bridging the divide between academic and applied research by identifying the structural similarity in their problem framing. Problemshed is operationalized by situating it in critical realism’s structures-mechanisms-events ontology, and by drawing on realist evaluation’s context-mechanism-outcome configurations. I use large-scale canal irrigation in India to illustrate how this is done.