Events

Interdisciplinary sustainability research, e.g., land-use or adaptation to climate change, is increasingly confronted with the difficulties of embracing complexity while building and testing theories that synthesize such complexity into actionable theories. Comparative case studies are frequently employed for this task. However, rigorous comparative approaches are yet frequently hampered by (i) a high heterogeneity of cases that limit generalization, and (ii) multiple epistemic perspectives (e.g. from institutional economics, geography or modelling) that are not easily integrated. In recent years, archetype analysis has been evolving as an approach to deal with this twofold challenge.

The summer school provided a cutting-edge introduction to archetype analysis by internationally leading experts. The approach was trained by hands-on applications, accompanied by an introduction to and training of suitable analytical methods (Qualitative Comparative Analysis or Cluster Analysis), and further developed. The educational event was hosted by IRI THESys in cooperation with the Resource Economics Group and the Berlin Workshop in Institutional Analysis of Social-Ecological Systems (WINS) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The 2018 Summer School was organised by Prof. Dr. Klaus Eisenack.