11. The Methodological Toolkit

Investigating social systems is a complex and confusing process. The goal of this thesis, to explore challenges to environmental and social certification in Vietnamese Pangasius, requires a rigorous approach that will ensure that I look at the problem as many different aspects as possible. I will do this by devising a methodological tool, or framework, and using it to structure the investigation, directing areas of inquiry and using responses to fill in as much of the framework as possible. The construction of the framework is guiding by my theoretical approach and the concepts of boundaries and embeddedness which I presented earlier. My investigation will be primarily guided by the ideas of Interactive Governance, and will be focused by the concept of boundaries when looking at the governance system and by the concept of embeddedness for my exploration of the system-to-be-governed.

In a previous section I introduced the ideas of the Interactive Governance framework from Jentoft, with some modification from Bavinck et al. which focused on the core characteristics of the system-to-be-governed and how the governing system should respond to them. In order to evaluate the governing system I will be using these five governance demands to describe four different certification systems currently being used or in development for Pangasius Aquaculture in Vietnam. I will create a matrix, pictured in Table 1 and use it to evaluate how certifiers draw boundaries around four different elements of the system, water, seed, ownership and credit.

A similar methodological tool will be used for the evaluation of the system-to-be-governed. In this case I will use the five core characteristics of the system to investigate the material and social embeddedness of the of the system-to-be-governed. The matrix in this case will juxtapose materiality and the social against the five characteristics as pictured in Table 2. In order to parallel the empirical evaluation of the governing system, I will investigate the same four system elements using the material and social perspectives to highlight embeddedness.

Although it may appear somewhat mechanistic, the use of this matrix stimulates a thorough investigation or the governance system forcing me, the investigator, to view the same element from a variety of angles. For the sake of continuity I will end each empirical section, four focused on different elements of the governing systems and four more for the system-to-be-governed, with a copy of the filled out matrix. this will allow the reader to quickly see a brief summary and easily compare it to other sections within the thesis.

In the following section I will delve into a description of my data collection methodology, how did I obtain the empirical data necessary to fill in each of these matrices.