Human rights are universal but have historically been realised within the framework of the nation state. In recent decades, they have been articulated also at the supranational and sub-state levels. Both state nationalisms and sub-state nationalist movements have used human rights in order to establish legitimacy and liberal democratic tensions. In the United Kingdom, British nationalists have attacked the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) both for its substance and its transnational reach and proposed to replace the Human Rights Act, which incorporates it into British law, with a British Bill of Rights. In Scotland, by contrast, there is a wide consensus in favour of retaining the direct applicability of the ECHR and for developing human rights further in a Scottish context. British and Scottish nation-building projects are competing to appropriate the theme of human rights.

The theme of Celts and Celticism has attracted fierce controversy over more than two centuries. Passing over the question of ancient origins, this article places the birth of Celticism in the modern period, in line with current understandings of nationalism. Examining the construction of the Celt in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Galicia and Cornwall, it traces a movement from culture into politics in the course of the nineteenth century. Political pan-Celticism was ultimately a failure not because it was ‘artificial’ but because of the political conditions of the times and the force of competing projects. Like other nationalisms it relies on myth and tradition but these are social realities not easily to be dismissed by appeal to scientific history. After two hundred years, moreover, Celticism has a history of its own and continues to resonate both in culture and in politics.

Journal Article Security, Cooperation, Governance: The Canada–United States Open Border Paradox, Edited by Christian Leuprecht and Todd Hataley Get access Security, Cooperation, Governance: The Canada–United States Open Border Paradox, edited by Christian Leuprecht Todd Hataley. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023. 354 pp. $29.95 paperback, and Open Access. Michael Keating Michael Keating University of Aberdeen, UK Corresponding author: m.keating@abdn.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Publius: The Journal of Federalism, pjae028, https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjae028 Published: 02 August 2024

This chapter examines the division of power between different levels of government in European countries. Some states are unitary, while others are federal with a constitutional division of power between the centre and the federal regions. Even within unitary states there are local and regional levels of government. The major debates about centralization versus decentralization are reviewed, including arguments about economic efficiency, democratic quality, and equity. The chapter also examines nationalist movements within states and the way they have sought greater autonomy or even secession. Finally, it considers issues of rescaling—that is, the shift of power and tasks across different levels—especially in the context of European integration.

Scottish devolution built on an existing structure of administrative devolution around the Scottish Office. The architects of devolution gave a lot of attention to the design of the Scottish Parliament but less to policy-making and delivery. Much of the policy capacity built up since the 1960s had been run down under Conservative governments after 1979. The new Scottish institutions faced a number of institutional, economic and political constraints on making their own policies. There have been significant divergences from policy in England but often these take the form of England diverging while Scotland remained the same. Successive Scotland Acts in 2012 and 2016 were guided by political considerations rather than examination of the powers and instruments needed. There has been a lack of the policy innovation that might have been expected in the new system. The argument is illustrated by examples, together with some footnoted personal reflections from half a century of following policy making in Scotland. There is no attempt to be comprehensive but rather to highlight key issues and trends.

Richard Rose’s Politics in England was not just a textbook. Its origins mark it out from the range of other texts that students of British politics could look to in the mid-1960s, most of which adopted a legal and/or historical approach to the study of British politics. Politics in England was part of a series of books—the ‘Little, Brown’ series—that reflected the vision of comparative politics associated with a ‘structural-functional’ approach that gained greatest popularity after the late 1950s, and above all with the ideas and active promotion of Gabriel Almond who, along with Lucien Pye, edited the series each volume with the simple title Politics in ….

It is often said that sovereignty is ever less meaningful in the modern world. Yet, sovereignty claims continue to proliferate. There are two elements: the subject of self-determination (sovereignty) claims and the object. Scottish independence and Brexit are two examples, yet they differ in important ways. Brexit postulates that the British people are the subject and complete sovereignty is the object. The Scottish independence movement claims the Scottish people is the subject but now places the object (independence) in a European context of shared sovereignty. Analysis of questions placed in the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey (2021) shows that, in spite of Scottish politics being polarised around the issue of independence vs. union, voters show flexibility about what each of these actually means.

The Central promise of the Brexit campaign was to ‘take back control’—to restore British sovereignty. Initially referring to parliamentary sovereignty, this rapidly morphed into the sovereignty of the British people, creating a binding mandate for withdrawal. That is an important move, but in both cases sovereignty was to be located in one place. This reflects the traditional ‘Westminster’ view of the United Kingdom as a unitary state in which competences may be devolved to local levels but ultimate power remains at the centre. At the periphery, there is a different view, which sees the UK as a union of nations, whose position within the state is the product of a historic pact and is conditional. The alternative Scottish theory denies that the Union of 1707 created a sovereign parliament that reflected only English traditions of sovereignty. On the contrary, the issue of sovereignty was unresolved, as recognised by Lord Cooper's obiter dictum in the famous case of MacCormick vs Lord Advocate in 1953, where he stated that ‘the principle of the unlimited sovereignty of Parliament is a distinctively English principle which has no counterpart in Scottish constitutional law’. This is not merely a Scottish nationalist interpretation but is present in Scottish unionist thought. Irish unionism incorporates ideas of a historic bargain and, in Northern Ireland, has been informed by the Covenant tradition in which loyalty is contingent; hence the historic coexistence of a strident ‘Britishness’ with willingness to break with the UK should unionists feel betrayed. This tradition sees the UK as a plurinational union of nations lacking in a unitary people or demos. Rather, citizens in the non-English nations have a choice of identities and can hold more than one at the same time. Nor does the UK have a single purpose or telos, but is interpreted differently across and within its component parts. Rather than being a single shared notion, the union is a family resemblance concept, without shared normative foundations. This ambivalence, far from a weakness, has historically proven to be its strength. Successive UK governments’ campaigns to give it firmer grounding in ‘Britishness’ or ‘British values’ have merely served to highlight divisions and, ironically, put the union itself at risk. Unionism thus stands out in Europe as a state ideology that is not inimical to the recognition of national pluralism. The one thing it could not accept was parliamentary institutions in the component parts, arguing that, precisely because these were nations, such institutions would inevitably assume sovereignty rights. This position shifted at the end of the twentieth century, when unionists accepted devolution settlements for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This marked a significant constitutional moment, but left critical questions in abeyance. The issue of sovereignty was skirted. Westminster insisted it retained the power to legislate in devolved matters, but accepted a convention that it ‘normally’ would not. Scotland was not given the right to secession, but in practice the Cameron government agreed to an independence referendum, staged in 2014. The Northern Ireland settlement provided for secession and union with the Republic of Ireland by referendum if the demand were present. It invited citizens of Northern Ireland to adopt and express a range and mix of identities. There were north-south institutions and east-west institutions satisfying both nationalist and unionist concerns. Issues of sovereignty and allegiance to the Crown were avoided. There was no reform of the centre corresponding to the reforms at the periphery so, as it had after the unions of 1707 and 1801, it carried on as before. Devolution did not encompass England (which accounts for some 85 per cent of the population) apart from a weak provision allowing English MPs a separate vote on legislation only affecting England. The new settlement reinforced the nature of the UK as a plurinational union, whose institutions were not fixed, but in evolution. Far from being in contradiction with the European project, this ad hoc union, with no defined constitutional status, no unitary demos, no fixed telos and a refusal to address the issue of sovereignty explicitly, bears a remarkable resemblance to that project. There is what scholars of European integration describe as a ‘good fit’. Indeed, the EU has provided an important external support system for the devolution process, compensating for its incompleteness. In the first place, Europe provides a discursive space for ideas of shared and divided sovereignty, multiple demoi and constitutional pluralism, which characterise the UK's evolving constitution. Europe is understood and framed by different actors in different ways, as a free trade area, an intergovernmental body, a federation in the making or a sui generis polity. It has economic, social, cultural and political dimensions, stressed at different times by different actors. Second, the EU provides for market integration and regulation at the European level, allowing for a more expansive devolution settlement within the UK than would otherwise be possible. The European Single Market has allowed an open border between the two parts of Ireland and the removal of all physical controls. It has permitted all-Ireland markets to emerge in agriculture and energy and encouraged cross-border cooperation. The Europeanisation of Ireland has coincided with the ‘post-nationalist’ turn in the Republic and an increasing recognition of the shared historical experiences of both islands. Third, the EU, together with the European Convention on Human Rights, provides a rights regime detached from national citizenship and national identity, enforceable directly in the devolved territories. In Scotland and Northern Ireland, large numbers of citizens do not regard themselves as British.1 Making this the condition for human and civil rights would therefore be problematic. European rights, however are another matter, commanding broad consensus. While England and Wales voted to leave by around 53 per cent, Scotland voted by 62 per cent to remain. Northern Ireland voted to remain by 56 per cent, but there was a big difference between the two communities. Nationalist voters supported Remain by over 80 per cent, while Unionists showed a majority for Leave (Table 1). Surveys have shown that many of the same factors worked across all three nations, but in Scotland and Wales the leadership of the nationalist parties delivered majorities for Remain among social groups that, in England and Wales, voted Leave. The Scottish National party (SNP) has long seen the EU as an important external support system for an independent Scotland. The Northern Ireland Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP) is historically pro-Europe. Sinn Féin, now the larger nationalist party, is historically eurosceptic but supported Remain on the grounds that it did not want to ‘repartition Ireland’ by erecting a hard EU border. The Democratic Unionist party (DUP) supported leave, while the Ulster Unionist party (a much-diminished force these days) was for Remain but now supports leaving. English identity, which has been growing in recent years, however, is strongly associated with voting Leave. This leaves a set of clashing mandates. The UK government insists that the verdict of ‘the British people’ must be respected, which assumes a single demos, denying the existence of a Scottish demos that was implicit in conceding the independence referendum. Within Northern Ireland, there are not the concurrent majorities that have been required over the years to bind both communities into constitutional reforms. Nor, however, are there clear majorities available for alternative paths, which we can characterise as: disintegration; recentralisation; and reconfiguration. In the immediate aftermath of the referendum, Sinn Féin called for a poll on Irish reunification. The SNP declared that a second independence referendum was likely, a position that was hardened in 2017 when Article 50 was triggered. Yet there are enormous difficulties in the UK falling apart on clear lines. Surveys in recent years have shown that there is no majority in Northern Ireland for reunification, even among Catholics, as long as the alternative of power-sharing under the Good Friday Agreement is available. Nor is there much enthusiasm in the Republic for taking on the North.2 Brexit may create a hard border between the two parts of Ireland, but Irish unification after Brexit would create a similar hard border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, so that the border would merely be moved. In Scotland, the vote for Remain did not, as widely expected, translate into increased support for independence. In fact, the electorate has never made the link between independence and Europe on which the SNP independence project is based. Surveys over the years have shown less euroscepticism across all parties in Scotland than in England, but particularly among Labour voters; SNP voters are divided in the same proportions as Scots as a whole. The British Election Study has examined the relationship between voting at the two referendums to produce a matrix with four boxes, none of which contains more than a third of the electorate (Table 2). This leaves the SNP highly cross-pressured and at the snap general election of 2017 it lost much of its support among Leave voters, forcing it to park the idea of a second independence referendum. Brexit has also undermined the independence-in-Europe strategy of 2014, based on the idea that, with both Scotland and the rest of the UK (rUK) inside the EU, there would be no hard border. With Scotland in the EU and rUK outside, the same problem would arise on the England-Scotland border as in Ireland. Some elements within the SNP have since argued that an independent Scotland could join the European Economic Area (EEA), which would keep it within the European Single Market and allow for free movement of people with Europe. As it would be outside the EU Customs Union, it could also potentially negotiate a free trade agreement with rUK. In the meantime, the SNP moved to support the emerging soft Brexit coalition alongside the Liberal Democrats, Greens and elements of the Labour and Conservative parties. While a soft Brexit might reduce the Scottish grievance about being dragged out of the EU, it would make independence easier, by keeping open trading links with rUK as well as the EU/ EEA. Nonetheless, Brexit has not triggered a process of the disintegration of the UK, as many feared likely in the immediate aftermath of the referendum result. A second scenario is that the United Kingdom reconstitutes itself as a unitary nation-state bound by the sovereignty of Westminster. This would go against evolving understandings of the UK as a quasi-federation in which the devolved institutions are an entrenched part of the constitution. Signs of this evolution had been the failure of the UK to challenge devolved competences (except on a couple of occasions in Wales); the reluctance to test the limits of devolution in the courts; pledges given by the No side during the Scottish independence referendum campaign; and the devolution acts of 2016 and 2017 for Scotland and Wales respectively, putting the Sewel Convention into statutory (albeit not legally-binding) form. The first test of this was the issue of those competences that are shared between the EU and the devolved legislatures, notably in agriculture, fisheries, environment and justice and home affairs. In many of these fields, there is no UK legislation or policy, so that coherence across the United Kingdom is ensured only by EU regulation. The UK government argued that, after Brexit, common UK frameworks would be needed to ensure the operation of the UK internal market, allow it to negotiate trade agreements with the EU and third countries, and deal with externalities. It further insisted that, as these matters are covered by EU laws, the devolved bodies were merely implementing EU policy rather than making policies themselves. So these competences could be repatriated to Westminster without the devolved level losing powers, as they would exercise the same amount of discretion at the implementation end. The EU Withdrawal Bill therefore proposed that all ‘retained EU law’ including that in devolved spheres, would revert to Westminster. UK ministers could then decide which powers to ‘release’ back to the devolved level. The Scottish and Welsh governments strongly disputed this interpretation and refused to give legislative consent to the Withdrawal Bill. After some months of negotiation, it was agreed that some UK-wide frameworks would be needed to deal with matters affecting the UK internal market, trade, international obligations and common resources. The UK government accepted that the relevant parts of the EU Withdrawal Bill would be subject to legislative consent from the devolved legislatures. It gradually conceded on the principle of blanket reservation of powers, instead working on lists of competences that could be released immediately. Other matters would be subject to non-legislative frameworks through memoranda of understanding or concordats. All powers would finally be released after seven years. Only a limited number of matters would be subject to legislative frameworks. The Welsh government accepted the compromise, but the Scottish Parliament, with only the Conservatives dissenting, refused legislative consent. Yet the Withdrawal Bill was passed. Meanwhile, the constitutional legality of the Scottish Parliament's legislation has been referred to the Supreme Court by the Westminster government. Arguably, this changes nothing constitutionally, as Westminster always retained the right to ignore the denial of legislative consent. On the other hand, the final version of the Withdrawal Bill for the first time stipulates what will happen in the absence of legislative consent for recentralisation of powers. If the devolved legislatures consent, transfer will proceed; if they do not consent, transfer will proceed; if they do nothing, transfer will proceed. Thus, a convention that was hitherto respected is explicitly repudiated. Brexit has therefore upset the pragmatic evolution of the devolution settlement, leaving a constitutional sore to fester. The third possibility is a reconfiguration in which the different parts of the United Kingdom would have different relationships with European institutions. The Scottish government's paper Scotland's Place in Europe,3 set out a range of possibilities. The first preference was for the whole UK to remain in the EU, followed by the whole UK remaining in the Single Market and Customs Union. Failing that, it was proposed that Scotland remain in the Single Market, using a variant of the EEA mechanism. The proposal was complex, involving, for example, identifying the final destination of goods in order to distinguish those within the Single Market from those circulating only within the UK, but the UK government later suggested something similar for keeping the UK in a customs arrangement while leaving the Single Market. The Scottish government paper also proposed that Scotland remain open to EU free movement of people, reflecting a cross-party consensus in the Scottish Parliament in a favour of migration and mobility. These proposals were ignored by the UK government, which rejected any territorially differentiated Brexit, and were not incorporated into the negotiations with the EU. The Scottish and Welsh governments returned to the issue in their Continuity Bills of 2018. As well pre-empting the EU Withdrawal Bill after the UK government had refused to amend it to leave out the reservation of retained EU law, these provided for Scottish and Welsh ministers to retain and update EU provisions. So, Scotland and Wales would effectively shadow EU policies even after Brexit. After the Welsh government came to an agreement with the UK over the Withdrawal Act, the UK government dropped its case against the Welsh Continuity Bill.4 The case of Northern Ireland proved even more difficult. A key item in the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) of 1998 was cross-border cooperation. Although there are not a lot of details about this in the GFA itself, the European Single Market from 1993 allowed for the removal of the remaining physical controls at the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. With the UK leaving the EU, and Ireland remaining, a new, hard border would be reinstated. Aware of the sensitivity of the issue, the UK government insisted that there would be no return to a ‘hard border’ or ‘the borders of the past’ but has been short on detail as to how this would be achieved. The Irish government, for its part, took a decision to play as a loyal member of the EU-27 and use its position there to have the Irish border included as a condition for starting substantive negotiations. In December 2017, an agreement was reached, reiterated in the agreement of March 2018 on transition and the start of negotiation on the future relationship. This was a fudge that avoided addressing the key question. Three options were stated. First, it was hoped that the future overall agreement between the EU and the UK would avoid the need for a hard border in Ireland. It is difficult to see how this can be achieved unless the UK remains in the Single Market and Customs Union, which it has said it will not do. (The UK government's Chequers White Paper would keep the UK in the Single Market for goods and agri-foods and establish a new and hitherto untried customs partnership with the EU, but this has not proved acceptable to the European Commission and member states.) If that failed, there would be a technological solution: customs formalities and regulatory controls would be done electronically, without any physical infrastructure at the border. Yet, such a virtual border would still be a border as long as there are regulatory differences between the EU and the UK. Such differences are particularly problematic for the agricultural sector, an important matter in north-south trade in Ireland and for border communities. Third, failing the other two, there would be regulatory alignment between the two parts of Ireland as far as necessary in order to keep the Good Friday Agreement working. The UK and Irish governments fundamentally disagree on what this entails. On a narrow interpretation, the GFA says relatively little about Europe and the UK has sought to define a narrow list of competences affected. On a broad interpretation, the working out of the GFA, including opening the border and all-Ireland markets and institutions, is deeply dependent on the Single Market. This Irish government therefore interpreted this as requiring full regulatory alignment. In fact, all three options would require such regulatory alignment. Unless the whole of the UK remained in regulatory alignment, this would require a differentiated Brexit for Northern Ireland, something the UK government does not accept. Nor does the DUP, which supports Brexit but opposes a hard border, and provides the UK government with its parliamentary majority. In fact, the idea of a ‘border in the Irish Sea’ has little support from any of the parties, as both parts of Ireland depend more on markets in Great Britain than they do on each other's markets. Reconfiguration of the UK's relationship with the EU to accommodate different forms of Single Market and Customs Union membership for the nations of the UK appears difficult, although it remains (in September 2018) the case that a differential arrangement for Northern Ireland is the EU's backstop arrangement. Successive devolution schemes since the 1880s foundered on two issues: sovereignty, and the place of England. This is not for want of thinking about the English question. Schemes for regional government have been around since the early twentieth century, including the reinvention of the Saxon Heptarchy. Moves from regional planning to regional government foundered in the 1960s and were followed by metropolitan governments in the 1970s, themselves abolished in the 1980s. After 1997, there was a further move to regional government, which failed after a referendum in the North East, and then metropolitan government came back as what was misleadingly called English devolution. In fact, these schemes were about the functional needs of planning, development and service delivery and had little to do with recognition, legislative autonomy and policy divergence as applied in the devolved nations. Englishness was historically accommodated within the broader scope of Great Britain or the United Kingdom, in which England was the predominant partner. Only after devolution to the periphery did it become apparent and politically salient. Brexit has further exposed these different understandings of nationality and identity. It has also exposed regional differences within England as London booms as a global city while the older industrial areas are marginalised. In the absence of massive payments from London to compensate for the economic effects of Brexit on these areas, the political divide is likely to widen. Yet, for all the talk of regeneration for the North, there seems little prospect for such fiscal redirection; rather, it seems, cities will have to manage more on their own. Following the 2016 referendum, there have been renewed calls for a comprehensive constitutional reform for the United Kingdom. They are sometimes tied to the idea of a Constitutional Convention5 or Citizens’ Assembly and a written constitution. This is not going to happen. In the first place, it would require a settlement of the most pressing constitutional issue, Brexit, on which there is no agreement or common mandate. Scotland, Northern Ireland and (in spite of its vote) Wales will seek international and European connections of various sorts. London, of course, has its own international priorities, but not the constitutional status to pursue them—and no UK government would allow its capital city such scope. Second, a Citizens’ Assembly implies a unitary demos, which does not exist and is even more elusive after Brexit. There are proposals for a British Bill of Rights, which some on the right want to replace the European Convention, but tying rights to Britishness is not going to work. Some have sought to underpin common British identity by grounding it in values such as democracy, the rule of law, fair play and social solidarity. Yes, these are the very values claimed by Scottish, Irish and Welsh nationalists to underpin their own national claims. Third, there is no agreement on the foundations of sovereignty, an issue exposed in the Scottish independence debate and after Brexit, but not resolved by consensus. Scotland and Northern Ireland have, in different ways, asserted a right to self-determination and UK governments have, in contrast for example with Spain, not denied the principle, even while making its exercise difficult. When constitutional agreement is proving so difficult within Northern Ireland, it is hard to imagine that it could be achieved across the UK as a whole. Scottish and Irish nationalists will not surrender the right, even although they have been willing to put it into abeyance in the short term. Fourth, no practical scheme has ever been designed to give effect to a written constitution that would command consensus. Federalising ideas go back to the nineteenth century, but a convincing design needs to do two things. It must constrain the sovereignty of Westminster as well as of the other national legislatures; and it must provide for England. Short of a definitive constitutional settlement, territorial issues will continue to be part of the politics of the United Kingdom. The vagaries of the electoral system have given territorial parties the balance of power in the 1880s, between 1910 and 1920, in the 1970s and since 2017. UKIP, a party whose support was largely confined to England and Wales, could have become a parliamentary broker and a future English party cannot be ruled out if Brexit does not deliver for the marginalised parts of post-industrial England. In that case, the United Kingdom may come to resemble Spain, where periods of majority government are interspersed with minority governments dependent on the territorial parties. There may be recurrent territorial crises, while at other times, territorial brokerage works. Currently in Spain, the Catalan nationalist parties are in all-out conflict with the centre, while the Basque Nationalist party has effortlessly transferred its support at the centre, helping to oust the conservatives and to install the socialists. Territorial brokerage will be about resources and powers and, given the small size of the peripheral nations, this will not necessarily be expensive or unduly intrusive in England matters. As long as England thinks this is a price worth paying for union, the union is likely to survive. In a post-Brexit world, that cannot be taken for granted. Yet although Brexit will leave behind fault lines in the territorial politics of the UK, it may not provoke fissures sufficiently deep as to break the UK itself apart.

During Richard Rose’s early career, the dominant view in political science was that the United Kingdom was a homogeneous unitary nation-state. Rose challenged this view, arguing that the United Kingdom was a multinational state with a unitary constitution. He distinguished between the ‘maze’ of functional and territorial complexity and the ‘mace’ of unitary parliamentary sovereignty and supremacy. Starting with the test case of Northern Ireland, Rose extended this analysis to Scotland, Wales and the UK as a whole. Constitutional changes since then, including the devolution settlements at the end of the twentieth century, have not altered this fundamental analysis, as tensions over the constitution and Brexit have shown.

While the United Kingdom was a member of the EU, a number of regulatory competences were shared between the EU and devolved authorities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. As Northern Ireland is governed by the Protocol, which requires dynamic alignment with most EU regulations, it is a case apart and this article deals only with Scotland and Wales. Where repatriated competences should go after Brexit has been a matter of political contention. Attempts to centralise at the UK level have been rebuffed so far but tensions remain. Common Frameworks are designed to deal with shared competencies but are inconsistent and work best with technical matters. UK measures regarding the application of international trade agreements, the EU Internal Market Act, legislation on subsidy control and professional qualifications undermine the regulatory autonomy of Scotland and Wales. The real test will come if the UK diverges radically from EU regulations while the devolved governments resist.

Abstract This chapter reviews contributions to the debate on methodological pluralism in the light of developments since the publication of our Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences. Reviewing the debates on ontologies, epistemologies, approaches, methodologies, and methods in the social sciences we point to a nuanced and complex picture of multiple positions that do not easily align around a main conflict line. The pluralist perspective rejects the idea that the various choices are as exclusive as sometimes presented. It challenges the natural science analogy on the grounds that the natural sciences are misrepresented and that social science is in any case different. It argues that there is no determinate relationship such that one school will consistently choose the same options all the way through from epistemology to method. Assumptions about how we can capture the reality—and how much of it—vary in more subtle ways. It is possible to encompass much of the field, not by imposing a single paradigm, but rather by setting certain standards of argumentation and debate while recognizing that there are differences in approaches and types of evidence. These do not inevitably constitute fundamentally different worldviews, but nor at they necessarily all compatible. While methodological pluralism is sometimes reduced to “mixed methods” which can entail mere combinations of data sources, the aim is to address a broader challenge by showing how approaches may be combined or synthesized all the way through the continuum.