Case study at the nexus of the global and the local

Social science research engages with an increasingly globally integrated and complex world, where human behaviour and settlements shape and are shaped by an individual’s immediate local environment as well as more distant environments of global influence. For example, the Covid-19 pandemic raised awareness worldwide of how bad health and animal welfare practices in open-air wet or wildlife local markets can trigger a global health crisis leading to acute human and economic losses globally. Similarly, scientific evidence has linked the methane emissions of oil and gas firm operations in regions of the United States to the acceleration of climate change, leading to extreme weather and disaster events that impact lives globally. Likewise, the 2022 Russian military invasion of Ukraine led to a humanitarian crisis as civilians sought economic and social refuge, leading to accommodation and other infrastructure pressures across Western Europe. The research of such events poses new challenges to social science scholars as they occur in uniquely local spaces but have wide-reaching global impacts.
This chapter examines these difficulties by providing examples of how to develop case studies that explore phenomena with both local and global components. We firstly explore the characteristics of such phenomena to develop a clearer understanding of the complexity associated with their study. Then, we outline three main approaches that social science researchers have used to try to capture the complexity of social phenomena that intersect the local and global: spatial, relational and practice/process-based. In section 4, we unpack how these three approaches were combined in a case study of Australian junior miner operations in Latin America. We conclude with a discussion that focuses on the advantages that emerge from combining the three main approaches used in social science, before giving considerations and limitations on the use of case studies to study phenomenon with local and global components.