Abstract
Since the turn of the millennium the pace of economic and social change in poor developing countries has accelerated considerably, eliciting a need for theoretical approaches and research methods appropriate for the empirical study of change. Complexity social science provides a paradigm for exploring both change and continuity, and when used with case-based methods, can lead to innovative and practical policy-relevant conclusions. Complexity frameworks for studying the dynamics underpinning social change and continuity are of increasing interest in the UK in the fields of management (Allen et al. 2011), social policy (Byrne 2011; Room 2011), and international development (Ramalingam and Jones 2008, Ramalingam 2013). In the complexity framework which underpins the study described here the communities are conceptualized as “dynamic open complex systems” co-evolving on path-dependent trajectories with internal sub-systems, for example households and people; overlapping contextual systems, for example wider clan and religious systems; and encompassing systems, for example the region and the country as a whole.
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Bevan, P. (2014). Researching Social Change and Continuity: A Complexity-Informed Study of Twenty Rural Community Cases in Ethiopia in 1994–2015. In: Camfield, L. (eds) Methodological Challenges and New Approaches to Research in International Development. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137293626_6
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