Compare methods

	Chain of Explanation	Land-Change Driver Analysis
Field	Environmental Sociology	Environmental Sociology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1987	2002
Originator	Piers Blaikie & Harold Brookfield; Andrew P. Vayda	Eric F. Lambin & Helmut J. Geist
Type	Multi-scale causal-tracing pipeline for environmental change	Spatial-and-causal pipeline for explaining land-cover change
Seminal source	Blaikie, P., & Brookfield, H. (1987). Land Degradation and Society. Methuen. ISBN: 9780416401400	Geist, H. J., & Lambin, E. F. (2002). Proximate Causes and Underlying Driving Forces of Tropical Deforestation. BioScience, 52(2), 143-150.
Aliases	Regional Political Ecology Chain of Explanation, Progressive Contextualization, Blaikie-Brookfield Chain of Explanation, Place-Based Environmental Causation Chain	LUCC Analysis, Land-Change Science, Land Use/Land Cover Change Analysis, Proximate-and-Underlying Driver Analysis
Related	3	3
Summary	The chain of explanation is the core analytical device of regional political ecology, introduced by Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield in Land Degradation and Society (1987). It treats an environmental outcome such as soil erosion not as a technical accident but as the visible end of a causal chain that runs from the individual land manager outward through the household, the regional economy, the state, and ultimately the world economy. Rather than blaming the farmer or the rainfall, the analyst follows the chain link by link to show how decisions on the ground are shaped by pressures and constraints set at much wider scales. The method is closely allied to Andrew Vayda's progressive contextualization, which begins with a specific human-environment activity and explains it by placing it in progressively wider contexts. Together these give political ecology a disciplined, scale-spanning way to connect local degradation to its political-economic roots.	Land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) analysis is the land-change-science method for detecting how the Earth's surface is being transformed and explaining why, with particular attention to the social drivers behind the change. Its defining move, formalized by Eric Lambin and Helmut Geist, is to separate proximate causes, the direct human activities such as agricultural expansion, wood extraction, and infrastructure that physically alter land cover, from underlying driving forces, the demographic, economic, technological, institutional, and cultural factors that operate at a distance and push the proximate causes. Their meta-analysis of tropical deforestation showed that single-factor explanations are rare and that change is usually produced by synergistic combinations of drivers. The analysis chains remote sensing of cover change to a structured causal attribution, giving social scientists a rigorous way to link maps of deforestation or urbanization to the human forces that produce them.