Causal Layered Analysis

Causal Layered Analysis lets us take a deep dive beneath the visible in our realities.

What it is

Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) was developed by Sohail Inayatullah and is a well-developed approach designed to surface such collective cultural understandings of reality that are usually not visible in day-to-day life. There are numerous CLA case studies that demonstrate how a discourse can be disassembled to identify its cultural underpinnings, and then reframed to generate new understandings of the issue being explored and potentially new action in the present.

Situated in the poststructuralist critical tradition, CLA assumes that reality is layered and, like Integral Futures, accepts that there are different ways of knowing. CLA allows us to created a space where all perspectives about an issue are surfaced, and recognises reality as inherently constructed and layered. That is, CLA seeks to move deeper beneath surface signals of an issue to explore its underpinning systems, structures, and worldviews. CLA allows ‘drilling down’ beneath superficial reporting of assumptions and reactions to issues to explore unconscious and unarticulated beliefs and ideologies influencing and shaping that issue. It allows the range of different meanings associated with the issue to be identified and locates the issue within the broader social structures within which it is felt and experienced.