Field Work
Working in the field with people in communities on tenure can arise in a number of ways. Leap has undertaken field work and used the Leap concepts practically in the following situations:
- facilitate new legal entities to hold and manage land
- write better constitutions and records for these legal entities
- facilitate capacity building for committees and members of common property institutions after land transfer
- assess how well common property institutions are working, and make recommendations for improvement
- improve governance systems for natural resource management
- understand peoples’ tenure arrangements in order to have these more recognised, to enable people to make recommendations for change: internally or to projects and programmes.
All these practical tasks have had the following components:
- looking at what is there now - an assessment component, requiring research or evaluation . This includes looking at the past to understand the present and change that is occuring;
- looking to the future - a planning component.
Fieldwork basics
An important principle: start where people are now - adapt, don't replace
Get clear about:
- How people identify themselves as a group - who they consider to be in or out and why.
- People's purposes and needs. There may be more than one purpose, and different aspects may call for different kinds of institutional arrangements for securing tenure, sometimes for different groups of rights holders. Purposes such as securing tenure on residential sites, getting access to communal grazing or high production arable land, improving equity, using land to generate income through joint ventures and delivering and maintaining infrastructure all involve people differently, and need different options for holding and managing them.
- People's existing structures, practices and experience around land rights administration
Consider future arrangements:
- Adapt rather than replace existing practices and institutions and accept change in a series of small steps. Work with an understanding of existing practices and authorities around tenure values and land rights administration. Understand the rules, systems and structures involved in administering land now and let people make change to specific aspects that are likely to work in practice.
- Form follows function. Don't start by thinking about CPAs or trusts or individual titles. First see what people want to do with land and how they do things now. Then decide what arrangements will meet these purposes best. Finally help people decide which legal entity is most appropriate.
- Raise issues of equity and democratic practice and seek agreement on principles and adaptation of practices that seem to be discriminatory. But remember that small but meaningful adaptation is more worthwhile than mere lip service expressed in documents and structures
- Give attention to setting up clear and do-able systems for allocation of land and recording of land holdings, which will be based on what works for people currently.
- Define specifically the respective roles and relationships with existing institutions for land rights administration such as tribal authorities. Avoid creating conflicting sources of authority, leading to confusion, undermining of authority and conflict.
- Remember that tenure security is the basis for development. For example, a group may want the local municipality to maintain their water supply, or is asking the Department of Transport to build and maintain a district road, or an interest group wants to access grant funding for infrastructure development from the Department of Agriculture. Check what this means in terms of suitable tenure arrangements, and make sure that people consider options and trade-offs.
- Avoid a great gap between the formal (constitutions, beneficiary/membership lists, business plans) and the informal (actual practice, the authority that people actually use, local conceptions of membership).