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To tell a story around the sorts of methodological innovation WeD enabled, particularly in relation to measurement and the environment, but also relationality and the limits to growth. What was radical, and what now feels like common sense? What might we have seen from a different vantage point?
Understandings of what constitutes good research methodology have changed radically in the past 25 years, even if practice has been slower to follow. This paper takes the notion of a revisit, where an anthropologist returns to a well-known field site, to explore how we would have approached WeD methodologically if we had known then, what we know now. A recent keynote by Bagele Chilisa talked about the development of African principles for evaluation, influenced by ubuntu (humanity to others), which included relationality and spirituality. The former was a key insight from the WeD approach but would we have got to it sooner with a different research approach, for example, one that involved co-research, was more contextual, open to other paradigms, etc. What were the effects of our ontological, epistemological and methodological choices? The paper addresses this via a brief summary of what we did within the WeD project, and how this has been extended methodologically by subsequent work. It then poses a thought experiment around how we might have approached the research using what’s currently thought to be methodological best practice, including decolonial research, and whether these approaches represent something substantially new that would have changed what we found.