Find a real-world strategy and its tensions
A research question, and a real place it happens in. If you do not have both, go back to step 2. This step needs a location, because strategies and the arguments about them are always local to somewhere.
- One named strategy you can cite
- Two contrasting positions, each traced to a source
- One tension, with the conflicting goals named
- A sentence saying what you think
The thing that catches most students out: this step is not about your investigation.
You have spent a while thinking about sampling. None of it belongs here. This step asks how different groups of people respond to an environmental problem, and why those responses collide. It is where "and societies" stops being a word in the subject title.
The IB does not prescribe an order, so this is our suggested approach. A fieldwork report has a natural shape that assembles itself: transect, quadrats, an index, a test, a conclusion. What it never produces on its own is a real-world strategy and the people arguing about it. Settle the argument first and your data gets collected to serve it. Leave it until afterwards and you are hunting for a strategy that fits results you already have.
Everything below is how we suggest you actually do it.
Your real-world strategy need not be what you studied
This surprises nearly everyone. The issue or strategy you explore here may differ from the one in your investigation, as long as the connection to your research question is clearly stated and credible.
Study water quality near fish farms and your strategy can be the regulations on fish farming, though you never measured a regulation. Use that freedom: pick a real-world strategy people are genuinely arguing about rather than the nearest one to hand.
Four sentences usually does it. Naming it and moving on is the lower band.
Listing two or three strategies looks like breadth and reads as indecision. Every perspective you then describe has to be attached to something, and with several strategies in play a reader cannot tell which one a given position is about, so the tension stops being about anything in particular.
This is a real moderator finding, not a hypothetical: "multiple strategies were identified, making the link to perspectives unclear". Pick the one people are arguing about hardest, describe that properly, and hang every perspective and the tension off it.
Where the positions actually live
No scientific paper will tell you what a lift company wants or what a farmer is worried about. From here your sources change character, and so does your bibliography.
Take quotes where you find them. A dated statement from a named person is worth a paragraph of paraphrase.
A public planning document. It funds lift replacement at one end of the resort, and at the other marks certain runs piste nature non damée: no snowmaking, no grooming, left to go back.
Found through local news coverage of the announcement, not a journal search.
Look for your strategy where decisions get announced rather than where science gets published: planning documents, council minutes, agency reports, the local paper. Search the name of your place plus the word for the decision, plan, scheme, permit, zoning.
Describing a tension, and explaining one
Two versions of the same paragraph. The difference between them is two marks.
The ski resort wants to keep the pistes open, but conservation groups want the forest to return. Local farmers also have an opinion. These groups disagree about the plan.
Three groups listed. No goal named, no reason they cannot both have what they want, no consequence.
The village depends on winter visitors for an economy of 400 people, so keeping the slope groomed is an economic necessity in its view. The nature reserve's objective is the recovery of natural forest cover, which the same grooming prevents. Because roughly 1,035 hectares have to be reclassified from protected to leisure land before any of the plan proceeds, and the local councils hold that decision while the regional authority holds the money, neither side can act without the other. The result has been years of incremental decisions rather than a settled plan.
Two goals named, the reason they conflict, and what the conflict has done.
What a tension actually does
The last part is the consequence, and it is where most students run out of road. There are really only five answers. One of them will fit your case.
Nothing happens while the groups negotiate.
A compromise weakens what the strategy achieves.
A group actively works against it.
Benefits land on one group, costs on another.
The conflict forces a different strategy.
Mostly delay, with a dose of uneven costs. The plan has been in preparation for years because the money and the planning powers sit in different hands. And where a piste is left ungroomed, the environmental benefit is general while the loss of summer pasture falls on a handful of graziers.
Name which of the five your tension produces, and say who carries the cost of it. "The groups disagree" is not a consequence, and it is the sentence that keeps this criterion in the lower band.
Then say where you stand
A personal perspective is on the checklist in the teacher support material, the document your teacher marks alongside the descriptors, though it is not in the descriptors themselves. Include it. Seventy words is plenty, and the budget below allows for that.
You are allowed to find it genuinely difficult. Saying which consideration weighs most with you, and what would change your mind, reads better than picking a side and sounding certain.
Strategy as afterthought. A paragraph about stakeholders bolted on near the end, with no real tension and no link back to the research question. It reads exactly like what it is, and it caps this criterion at two marks. Doing this step now, rather than just before the draft is due, is the whole defence against it.
It can suggest who the interested parties around a decision like yours usually are, and what a document of that kind is called, so you know what to search for.
It cannot tell you what those groups think. This criterion wants positions traced to a named organisation on a given date; a summary of "what conservationists say" is not a source and cannot be cited as one.
Ready for step 4?
0 of 9Tick only what is true of your draft. An untickable box is the next thing to go and do, not a mark against you.
Step 4 uses what you just made. The tension tells you which measurements matter, because the strongest version of this argument is one where both sides can point at your data. Knowing what each of them would want to see is how you decide what to go and measure.
The ski piste investigation used throughout this guide is a teaching reconstruction. The location, sampling design, plant records and soil data come from real fieldwork at Mijoux in the French Jura. Canopy cover measurements were added to illustrate good practice and were not part of the original fieldwork. Photographs are the author’s own, taken at the site.