Content areas to cover
Formalizing institutional arrangements for holding and managing land to enable people to take transfer of land, St Bernards and Amandushill, January 2003
In planning fieldwork to formalize institutional arrangements to hold and manage land at St Bernards and Amandushill, we drew on LEAP theory to identify the content areas to cover as a useful planning tool for real situations. On the one hand we wanted to work with real content from the ground, which we had only started to unpack. On the other hand, we recognized that in real situations practitioners often have to write proposals and budgets without having met people on the ground.
- We summarized what we already knew about St Bernards, including people's burning issues.
- We noted some burning issues that would impact on our work but that would have to be dealt with outside the workshop process
- We then developed content areas that need to be covered in thinking about institutional arrangements, and matched the hot issues to the content areas.
With each of the content areas, the logic of the process was to be
- what is the current practice - what people do now?
- what works and what does not? Anyone for whom it doesn't work?
- what needs to be adapted or changed?
- what is the principle or rule?
A question we had to resolve as we went along is how deep do we go? noting that too much detail might confuse us (and everyone there). We were clear that we should steer clear of spending lots of time on stuff that is not useful to people, such as quorums.