Developing Interdisciplinary Conceptual Frameworks An Interpretivist Approach to Knowledge Exchange and Social Resilience to Climate Change Through Participatory Decision-Making in Multicultural Communities

Rapid urbanisation has concentrated populations, assets, infrastructure, and services within cities, thereby intensifying urban exposure and vulnerability to climate-related hazards. As the frequency, severity, and cascading consequences of extreme heat, flooding, bushfires, and other climate-related events increase, urban resilience has become a central concern for public policy and governance. At the same time, increasing migration flows have transformed many cities into super-diverse social environments in which residents differ not only by language, country of origin, and religion but also by migration status and socioeconomic position. These conditions create both capacities and challenges for climate resilience: culturally diverse communities may hold valuable local, experiential, and culturally embedded knowledge, while unequal access to information, institutional recognition, and participatory processes may determine whose knowledge, interests, perceptions, priorities, experiences, and initiatives are heard, trusted, and incorporated into decision-making. Strengthening social resilience to climate change therefore requires more than technical measures or planning. It requires attention to how climate-related information, experience, and knowledge some of which may be contested or in tension with one another circulate among diverse community groups; how these flows support anticipation, preparedness, response, recovery, and adaptation; and how participatory decision-making processes enable or constrain the recognition, translation, and integration of diverse forms of knowledge. Addressing these interrelated questions cannot be achieved through a single disciplinary lens. It requires an interdisciplinary conceptual framework capable of bringing climate resilience, knowledge exchange, participatory decision-making, and multicultural studies into a coherent analytical relationship. Conceptual frameworks are central to this task because they define the scope of inquiry, clarify conceptual relationships, and guide empirical investigation. Yet methodological guidance for developing interdisciplinary conceptual frameworks remains fragmented, particularly where concepts originate in different disciplinary traditions and must be selected, interpreted, and integrated in relation to a context-specific policy problem. This limitation is especially important for interpretivist research in which concepts relevance, analytical value, and relationships must be interpreted in relation to the research problem, empirical setting, theoretical traditions, and disciplinary perspectives involved in the inquiry. This paper presents an emerging interpretivist methodology for developing interdisciplinary conceptual frameworks. Rather than prescribing a universal model, it outlines a transparent and reflexive process for identifying, comparing, evaluating, and integrating concepts while making explicit the theoretical assumptions and contextual choices that shape the resulting framework. The emerging conceptual framework supports an investigation of how participatory decision-making processes shape the circulation, recognition, and integration of diverse forms of knowledge, and how these processes may strengthen or constrain the social resilience to climate change. More broadly, the paper contributes a context-sensitive approach to interdisciplinary concept development for complex public policy and governance challenges. Keywords: Interpretative Method, Interdisciplinary Conceptual Framework, Knowledge Exchange, Social Resilience to climate change, Multicultural Communities.