More about participatory approaches to enable conversations about tenure
In fieldwork you come across different levels of understanding of terms facilitators use freely, like CPA. If you have to use a term like CPA, don't assume that anyone knows what you mean, don't assume they do not know. Check people's understanding and if necessary explain how you use the term.
Tenure and rights issues are very abstract. So to get people to name what they know about these things, you....
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A lot of the work in field design is to do activities in the right order and to ask questions in a way that enables people to name what they know. Example: people struggle to answer questions like: "What do you understand to be your land rights?". You have to come in from some concrete place like a boundary dispute, before people can speak meaningfully about their land rights. It is then your job to interpret this so you can understand it in your own mental frameworks. e.g. answer the question "What are their land rights?"
The way people think and do things on the ground is not necessarily the same as the official view reflected in documents. The fact that people have been taught about their constitution does NOT mean that they have learnt or that they have changed their way of doing things. Most constitution documents have serious problems as tools for use by communities. You can expect that practice will be very different from what is in the constitution and not assume that people know what is in their constitution or even that the constitution exists.
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The only way to talk about practice is to keep talking about what has happened. Practice might be in the distant past (e.g. how the induna used to allocate land) or the more recent past (e.g. since land transfer or last week). If you ask about how things work, you may also hear about how things are supposed to work, rather than about how they do actually work. For example:
Interviewee: "If you don't plough your land, the chief can take it away."
Interviewer: "Who do you know who has lost their land like this?"
Interviewee: "Nobody"
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When people talk about how things should happen, they might be saying something about a problem that exists. They might be proposing a solution or a new rule. They might be expressing something about a deep vision of how the world should be, which is often where their energy lies. An example: "People should live together in harmony" is often offered as a rule for new CPAs.
Power dynamics around land are often frightening for people. This inhibits free and clear expression of how things actually happen. People may say everything is fine when it isn't
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People may accept inequalities as natural that you might consider unfair. They may be trading fairness to avoid the risk of something worse than unfairness, like violence.
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When it comes to issues like transparency or gender equity, sometimes people have not thought about these issues in relation to the topic of land tenure and administration, and yet when they do, they have important things to say. Remember that real change is often slow; and that people can only do what is possible for them - they may make changes, but will also want to minimize risk.
In interactions with government officials, people have to get a fit between what they want and the conditions ("strings") that are attached to all government programmes. In getting this fit, they may not have named some of the main purposes for which they registered as members of CPAs. Institutional arrangements for tenure security depend on land uses, and if you don't hear correctly the purposes for which people really want to use land, the arrangements will be a mess.
For example, a group in KZN registered as beneficiaries of grants under Act 126 mainly in order to get more grazing for members of the group, a purpose that would have been completely unacceptable to government. Planning took place as though people were coming to settle. After a couple of years outsiders were surprised that so few people had settled on the farm.
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