Field Method Toolkit
Broad land use mapping
Purpose
To create a visual material to help to probe and understand the practice and concepts of land rights and their administration as they relate to the group as a whole. It is good place from which to develop a list of burning tenure issues for discussion.
Method
Ask people to draw a map of the land as it is now, showing the things that are important to them. If people have trouble getting started, ask them to start with a road or a river and work from there. Let people finish what they want to say before prompting. If people don't put everything in, draw from a checklist: e.g. areas with lots of houses, fields, plantations / forests, major infrastructure.
Probing to start discussion
Examples of open probes
- For different land uses: Who uses this? Who doesn't? Why not? Who manages this? Who decides who will use this?
Examples of more specific probes
- What is new here since land transfer? Ask people to show it on the map. Has anyone new come to live here since land transfer? Anyone left? What happened to house / residential site?
- Anyone using land who doesn't live here?
household mapping
Purpose
To create a visual material to help to probe and understand land rights administration and rights issues as they relate to individuals and households by working from inside the household site outwards.
Method
Have a pool of paper and drawing materials in the centre of the group. Give each participant a piece of A3 paper and ask them to show their site and the buildings on it, the people who live in their household (women, men, children, pensioners, relatives, tenants ...), their livestock, and the land that they use. Can use symbols for livestock - e.g. sticky dots. The facilitator demonstrates.
When they are finished ask people to show how their pictures fit together, i.e. make a broad map from the household maps outwards. Ask if they can draw with chalk on the floor or on the ground to show land beyond the sites e.g. draw a road; a river; grazing; natural resources that people use beyond the household.
Choose household maps which are very different from one another e.g. very large vs very small, male and female-headed households.
Probing to start discussion
Examples of open probes:
- Ask about differences "Why...?"
- How did you get your residential site?
Examples of more specific probes
- Application, allocation, demarcation: How did you get your residential site? What did you do first? And then...? And then...? How did you get to use... be part of ..... benefit from...?
- Substantive rights: Ask about who makes decisions at relevant points of change in land uses or rightsholders e.g. allocation to relatives, sale, inheritance...
Records and recording systems: How do you know what is yours and what is hers? How do you keep track of....? How do you know where boundaries are?