Document analysis

Documents are also used to serve as a supportive role for this research. In this research, 62 pieces of formal document plus hundreds of informal documents (mainly news clips, leaflets or website materials) were collected via different channels and stored in the database with the total word count of roughly 110,000 (See Appendix 2.) The documents analyzed include business correspondence and project files, policy or legal documents and relevant media coverage. The information and ideas conveyed through these documents and shared by actors provide strong

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supportive evidence for the norms and rules that have been observed from the observation. Most of these documents provide ‘official’, ‘normative’

and ‘common-sense’ versions of social phenomena (Silverman, 1999) and therefore serve as background materials. Documents may also illustrate the contradiction between the norms on paper and the norms on the ground, and how such contradictions may potentially lead to a new balance in the reality of CDM governance at the implementation level. In other words, by analyzing the documents we discover the ‘hidden’

implications for the governance arrangement by revealing the gap between ‘what is written’ and ‘what is actually happening’.

Any piece of document can be regarded as a consequence or evidence of ongoing interactions between social actors that are somehow related to it.

Therefore, many interesting questions can be asked about the documents, as illustrated below:

 How are texts written?

 How are they read?

 Who wrote them?

 Who read them?

 For what purpose?

 On what occasions?

 With what outcomes?

 What is recorded?

 What is omitted?

 What is taken for granted?

 What does the writer seem to take for granted about the readers?

 What do readers need to know in order to make sense of them?

Source: Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983: 142-3

The aim of addressing these questions is not just to review the format and content of the texts, but to reveal the causes of its publication as well as the decision making process associated with its completion (Silverman, 1999). For example, China’s Measures for the Operation and Management of CDM Project in China (NDRC, 2005) was an important policy document, which reveals, at least partially, how interests of various government ministries are organized to generate this policy, what is on the agenda and what is not, how the business actors are expected to behave as a response to the policy, etc. The revised version of this policy, published in 2010, however, revealed some crucial changes in these variables and provides valuable insights in understanding the dynamics of political and economic context around CDM arena from a historical perspective.

In the meantime, business documents such as a company annual reports, company websites, or auditing reports of public listed companies are a

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potential goldmine for the investigation of interactions of the targeted company with other actors such as financiers, investors, competitors, regulators and the public stakeholders. These documents also inform the researcher about the companies’ official standpoint towards CDM, to what extent they are involved in CDM activities and what role CDM is playing for its business strategy. In addition, it also tells a story of how and for what the decisions are made within the organization, and can reveal some interesting statistics and proceedings that are crucial in understanding CDM activities at an organizational level.

Besides official documents such as policy papers or company profiles, a large number of unofficial documents are also examined. These include email correspondence, memos, internal reports, media coverage, etc. The ethical issues and access resources of these documents will be explained in detail in the following paragraphs. The content of these documents is often project focused, which provides fertile sources to investigate project-based, on-going power dynamics among the actors when negotiating or doing a particular project. In addition, these documents often present a vivid picture of how policy is landed on the ground and dealt with by the non-state actors through their day-to-day practices via emails or meetings. Analysis of documents within the qualitative domain is all about detecting how social reality shapes what is said or written in the documents (Grbich, 2007). The unofficial documents can be treated as

the records of these social actions that take place on a daily basis, through which the norms, rules and patterns of behavior can be detected.

In general, this research examines the documents produced at multiple governance levels, ranging from the policy (national) level, the organizational level, and then down to the specific (project files) level.

Like much document focused research, it starts with an investigation of linguistic coherence or contradictions in presentation, understanding and interpretations of the texts. Then the researcher seeks the explanation and implication of these contradictions by asking questions such as: how it emerged and by whom? Whether and in what way it is reconciled? The ultimate purpose for doing so is to understand through what process the normative realities are depicted and transformed by actors’ intended or unintended actions, rather than examine the validity or ‘true or false’ the statements. The documents do not speak for themselves and it would be naïve to take its content for granted as transparent representations of the reality of the world of CDM. Yet, as Atkinson and Coffey (1997) argue texts are important social facts that should be approached for what they are used to accomplish, yet should not be treated as firm evidence as there is a clear division between what is recorded on the paper and what happens in reality. Therefore, documentary sources shall not be treated as surrogates for other sources of data.

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4.2.3. Interviews

The decision to use interviews as the main data generation technique is based on the reflection of the research needs. Qualitative research interviews intend to reveal ‘subject perceptions’ of the research themes (Kvale, 1996). In the research, the private actors’ perceptions on CDM development, its critics and its contribution, and their relationships with other social actors, are important elements to understand the political economy of carbon markets and their governance process. Interviews may disclose some hidden ‘facts’ of the speaker’s identity and power statues in the CDM circle, and reveal how different actor groups are trying to make their voices heard, identity established, and interests legitimized in the governance process. Interviewees’ narratives may contradict what they do or what they should do, which provides fertile ground for in-depth investigation. More importantly, it helps to clarify interviewees’ understanding of their own CDM related actions, or ‘what they think they are doing’, and hence bridges the gap between ‘what they do’ (from observation) and ‘what is written’ (from documentation analysis). Interviewees’ detailed accounts may produce convincing explanations of the observable differences between written texts and on-the-ground activities, so that questions like ‘why and how these deviations happened’ can be answered.

During the field work, altogether 40 formal interviews were conducted between November, 2010 and October 2011 (see Appendix 1. for the interviewee list). The interviews often last from 40 minutes to over 3 hours, with most of them are recorded. It should be noted that the CDM structure is particularly complex in terms of the sheer number of various actors groups involved in the project cycle. Therefore the focus of interviews is given to those actors groups that are directly relevant to its governance structure. Among them are the officers both at national or municipal level, business managers of wind CDM project developers, bankers and financiers who underwrite project risks, on site engineers who tackle project implementation and maintenance barriers, project validators and consultant companies, and NGOs who depend on their involvement in the project. Due to the complicated nature of CDM governance, interviews with line-ministerial officers, local academics, journalists and community stakeholders are also included on an ad-hoc basis.

The language used for interviews was normally Chinese as the first language of the both parties. However a few interviews were done in English because the informants are expatriate carbon managers in China who are not confident to use Chinese as interview language. Choosing expatriates in China originated from the intention to keep the informants as diversified as possible to get balanced views. In the same vein, I also

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interviewed former CDM experts who already left CDM business, for various reasons. Their account of CDM project development in China provides significant information and insights.

According to Kvale (1996), it is crucial to make sure the relevance of the research topic or themes to the interviewees’ life and experience. This research mainly use open-ended and semi-structured interviews because it is unrealistic to attempting ‘standardized interviews’ with undifferentiated questions and procedures when engaging a wide range of actors in the interviews. Although all the interviewees are somehow involved in CDM activities on daily basis, their different jobs and expertise split them rather significantly in terms of being capable to answer certain questions. For example, when talking about the implementation risks of the CDM project, a buyer may be interested in the probability of CER delivery;

whereas the banker may worry about the security of the loan repayment, and the policy maker may be mainly concerned with the negative impact of a failed project to the successful registration rate with the EB in his political purview. Therefore, interview questions were carefully crafted to suit participants’ various backgrounds and experience, even though the purpose of the questions or focus of the issues to be investigated remained coherent throughout the interview study. For example, although different questions concerning ‘environmental integrity’ were designed for DOE people and project owners, the purpose was essentially the

same: understanding peoples’ perception of ‘business as usual’ way of doing CDM project and its implications for ‘additionality’ issue.

In order to keep the subject on track, the researcher made the theme and purpose of this research clear at the beginning of each interview. The process of the interviews was manipulated more like a ‘naturally occurring’ conversation where the interviewee was encouraged to be open and conversational. From time to time, I required the informants to comment on some existing CDM related criticisms or arguments with their own experiences in order to get deeper insights. For the same reason, I also picked up some key words, phrases or ideas that I think are related to the research themes and questioned the informants for further explanation or clarification. For example, one of the informants kept using the word ‘cheating’ during the interview. I picked up this word and asked him to elaborate what he really meant by cheating. He then presented a fantastic story of his disillusionment of CDM after seeing this mechanism deviating significantly from his original ideas.

Ambiguity is another issue when informants might sometimes be vague and inconsistent in their expression (Kvale, 1996). Although this may due to the faulty communication or even informants’ particular personality traits, it is more often a manifestation of how interviewees make sense of the genuine contradictions in the real world (Kvale, 1996). Yet, treating

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such kinds of self-conflicting statements is always tricky, because if the researchers keeps on asking the questions over the contradiction elements of the statements, the informants may realize these inconsistencies and

‘fine-tune’ the previous statements or perceptions, which is not always welcomed by the researcher. In such cases, I usually encouraged the participants to use other stories to explain a situation that appears to be self-contradictory or unclear to me (though not necessarily to the informant), rather than raise the contradiction directly and ‘force’

informants to have a second thought about it.

Being open minded and sensitive to the potential of change or need to modify interview questions or procedures is also needed. The need for change may be due to various reasons. For example, during this field study there was an increasing worry about CDM’s future, which led to significant changes in peoples’ perspectives. New policies issued during the same period may also lead to the similar issues. People will respond to these external variables and develop new ideas or insights that need to be reexamined if possible. In this research, I tried to revisit some informants when they changed their roles in the business circle (i.e. form DOE to consultancy, or vice versa) in the hope that the change of duties might have led to a change of perspective. This assumption was proved largely valid and most of the revisits became important conversations of this field study. In addition, the interview procedures were also modified

to best suit interviewees’ convenience. For example, in the later phase of interviews, I often suggested interviews to be taken in unofficial settings such as in a quite café or tea house, because I noticed most of the informants feel it more relaxed and open in these places, rather than sitting with a tie and suit in the office.

All of the interviews were recorded with prior consent of the interviewees. The use of digital recorder is essential because it allows the researcher to document the non-verbal details of the conversations, such as pauses, overlaps and the like, which may reveal some interesting information. Besides, note taking during the conversation has two distinct negative effects. Firstly, it distracts the researcher who may be busy writing down the notes but ignoring some important words, phrases and even expressions that should be picked up for further questions. Secondly, interviewees may not feel very comfortable with someone sitting in front of him or her, and trying to taking down every single word he is saying, hence the flow of the conversation can be severely interrupted. Although some informants may feel uncomfortable at the beginning with the recorder, after a few minutes they normally become used to it and continue talking in a more relaxed manner.

So far I have described document analysis, observation and open-ended interviews as the three ways of gathering data in this research. Then what

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about credibility? As I explained previously, these techniques are used mainly to understand ‘what the actors should be doing’, ‘what they are actually doing’ and ‘what they think they are doing’. In order to make the inferences reliable, triangulation is necessary to carry out ‘cross examination’ between these three sets of data. Triangulation is a method whereby different methods are used in order to remove bias in single method-oriented research and thus achieve the validity and reliability of the research findings. Denzin (1970) as an early advocator of this method argues that a field strategy should simultaneously combine multiple sources of data collection as a method of triangulation process in order to overcome the partiality of data and present a complete picture. Later supporters of triangulation also hold the assumption that different methods should lead to the same findings and if it is not the case, certain measurement must be ‘flawed’ (Moran-Ellis et al, 2006).

The limitation of this argument is clear when various research methods can also lead to erroneous research results (Fielding and Fielding, 1986), while different results may not necessarily be due to a flawed measurement, but rather a factual difference between social reality, people’s perceptions and a normative statement. Hence in this research, both convergence and divergence are actively sought after since the former may suggest a coalition in presence, while the later reveals conflicts and contradictions. It is believed that both can provide

interesting evidence for a comprehensive understanding of the research issue, as long as they are grounded in disciplined theoretical perspectives.