R EFLECTIONS  ON  THE  METHODOLOGY

The research task I embarked upon was an ambitious one, particularly because of the nature of the case studies that I wanted to explore. It is not common practice for research on peri-urban processes to include a fieldwork component at a location that is physically situated ‘outside’ the peri-urban context. However, in my research I did precisely this by including the case of the Central Pollution Control Board. This is an expert-led organisation, performing all the tasks of a national policy advisory body on water quality management, but situated in the capital of Delhi instead of peri-urban Ghaziabad. In doing so, my intention is to show how these two different worlds of policy action can be at the same time ‘contrasting’ as well as ‘similar’, and to illustrate the ‘cross-scale’ interactions that can influence policy success as well as failure. This is important both in terms of being consistent with the conceptual framework that informs this study, and for illustrating how problems of water quality are defined from multiple perspectives. But at the same time in moving across these different worlds, cultural as well as geographical, dilemmas arise, puzzles confound and social relations are formed that shape the final written output. I would like to list a few here to give the reader a sense of how the process of research and fieldwork has influenced the researcher in a more personal way.

First is the issue of maintaining a position of neutrality when engaging with multiple, and often adversarial points of view. Who are to blame for the persistence of water pollution in a peri-urban setting, and who are the victims? And more importantly, where does one draw the line between the science and the politics in understanding the

underlying causes of water pollution? I pondered these types of questions throughout this research journey, and in many situations I found myself being pulled between different positions. Particularly in my exploration of the Board, I attempted to present a

‘balanced’ account of how water quality management is perceived both from the perspective of the scientists working ‘inside’ the organisation, as well as from the point of view of other stakeholders not immediately related to the functioning of the Board.

These include activists working for environmental NGOs based in Delhi, academics and former employees of the Board. But when it came to doing the research, I could sense that the risk of privileging certain perspectives or misrepresenting others always loomed large.

For example, I sometimes wondered whether I was identifying too much with the environment NGO positions I encountered, particularly the position of activists based in Delhi who were normally fierce critics of the Board. During my engagement with Sushil Raghav and in the process of searching for ‘clues’ to corrupt industrial and government practices, I often found myself feeling frustrated with the pollution problems I

encountered and became acutely aware that these feelings could lead to biases and weaken my own capacity to maintain an objective stance in my own interpretations.

Equally, there were times when I questioned whether my prolonged engagement with Board scientists was bringing my own views too close to theirs, particularly because I had to learn a lot about the actual ‘science’ of water quality management before I could come to write about it from a critical point of view. I therefore found myself in doubt about whether I was replicating the same explanations for water quality problems I encountered that the scientists discussed with me, or whether my own engagement was indeed fruitful for identifying ‘grey’ areas and possible limitations in the science. I found that resolving these dilemmas took time, and only after attaining a certain degree of distance from the subjects of my research, for instance only after coming back to the UK, was I able to look at my data with some degree of impartiality. But more generally, managing the dangers of misrepresentation and the inevitable difficulties of having to be both impartial and involved with my research subjects was at various times a source of tension.

Secondly, personal dilemmas arose in the process of data collection. Early on in the fieldwork I used a pre-designed questionnaire as my primary method for data collection (see Appendix 3). This questionnaire was designed on the basis of certain expectations, particularly regarding the level of access to information I could gain from the

respondents working in the organisations I was interested in. However, in the event, I discovered that the contexts I was studying were much more challenging than I had earlier anticipated. For instance, when I met with some officials in Ghaziabad, I would frequently receive fragmented stories and partial ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers to questions I was expecting a fair degree of elaboration. Given the central role of discourse in this research, this quickly became a serious obstacle to my data collection strategy. It also made me question the usefulness of questionnaires in the Indian bureaucratic setting, where I found that the officials I was engaging with were keen to keep their knowledge and experiences secret.

This problem is not easily overcome, but after spending some time in the field I found that developing ‘partnerships’ with a small number of actors became a useful strategy for overcoming some of the difficulties of access. One such partnership building exercise was with Dr. Shastri, a microbiologist working for Ghaziabad hospital. Yet another was with environmental activist, Sushil Raghav (see also section 3.4). Also, at the level of understanding how the Board functions, I decided to interact more closely with a small number of scientists as opposed to all the scientific staff that were

employed by the Board. To develop these partnerships I deviated considerably from the standard questionnaire approach. I invested considerable time in getting to know my research partners; I met with them regularly, and accompanied them to their place of work. I took time to interact with them at a social level and met them outside their normal office hours as well.

The limitation of building such partnerships with the research subjects, however, is that it can be a rather slow and time-consuming process. For instance, only after meeting with Dr. Shastri regularly at his office over several months was I able to take note of his

‘own’ views regarding the pollution problems affecting the district. This differed strikingly, for instance, from the normal rhetoric of officials in the district, which

focused mainly on ‘listing’ the functions of his or her respective organisation. Similarly, only after my meetings with Sushil became more regular (i.e. on a daily basis, when I was conducting fieldwork in Ghaziabad), was I able to gain his trust and use some of the official documents he had collected over several years of exercising his rights under the RTI Act. If I were conducting this research in a different setting, where there was perhaps less secrecy around official decision-making processes, a structured

questionnaire would have been a more useful methodological tool, and presumably would have allowed the research to draw insights from a larger pool of respondents. But given the issues of access encountered both in the context of the Board as well as in peri-urban Ghaziabad, many of the main insights of this research are drawn from the partnerships which I formed with a relatively small group of actors.

A key aim of this research has been to bring to the forefront the perspectives of those citizens who are often excluded from expert and technical framings of water quality.

However, as Mehta has also highlighted, researching marginality can often be a

complex task (Mehta, 2008). Although I have tried to provide an honest portrayal of the events I experienced while engaging with marginalised citizens, I was also aware that the risk of essentialising certain citizen views and accounts was always present. For instance, it was not always straightforward to establish clear links between marginality and exposure to deteriorating water quality, not least because at some level, water pollution was having visible negative affects across different social classes.

In rapidly changing peri-urban contexts where there is often widespread environmental degradation, identifying who is being marginalised and who is better served poses even greater challenges. In Ghaziabad, the middle-classes, although less vocal about

problems of water pollution, were also affected in important ways, for instance because of the proximity of the polluted river Hindon to their location of residence, or because it was evident to them that wider policies drawn at the capital made serious concessions to environmental protection when it came to managing the towns where they chose to live.

I decided to ‘single out’ citizens residing in the villages on the basis of how these spaces were represented in official discourse, and the fact that in these spaces peri-urban

citizens faced risks that were seriously harmful and at times even life threatening, as highlighted by my experiences. However, in practice, when conducting social science research these choices can often be highly arbitrary and heavily influenced by the way we as researchers experience marginality. In other words, investigations proceed sometimes through a certain degree of intuition, which arises from being situated at a particular place and at a particular point in time (Mehta, 2008:237).

Finally, in my engagement with those citizens regularly exposed to risks from water pollution, the fieldwork was on several occasions confounded by problems of

communication. With environmental activists and scientists, literacy was valuable to the extent that exchange of knowledge could generate a certain measure of partnership building. In my engagement with citizens, however, this exchange had numerous unstable moments. I can recall that after one of my visits to the village settlements, an article appeared in the local newspaper that noted in the headline that ‘a researcher from the UK’ had visited the villages to study problems of environmental pollution. This

made me rather conscious of the type of impact my research was having on the

communities I was studying. I did not want to create false expectations, nor to adopt the image of a ‘social benefactor’ for the communities I studied. I have tried to overcome the dangers of being misunderstood by creating the time and space needed for research participants to get to know me, in the same way that I was aspiring to learn more about their own lives. But as Mehta suggests, it often cannot be helped that as researchers ‘we can be painfully aware of the power relations that shape our research, and the fact that that most of us conduct research from positions of privilege about people in difficult situations’ (Mehta, 2008:248). In these circumstances, all players know that they are vulnerable to being misrepresented, while language differences can only accentuate the problems.

3.10. Conclusion

This chapter has attempted to describe the methodology used to collect and analyse the data for this research. I have discussed the research strategy and how it has been used to develop deeper insights on water quality policy processes. The methods of data

collection have been described and the methods used to explore the separate case

studies have been outlined. Finally, I have discussed briefly some of my own reflections on the methodology, its limitations and how something of my own position as a

researcher may have come to shape the final delivery of the pen.