Field Method Toolkit
Probe questions
Probe questions take people into deeper discussion, or raise hot issues or critical incidents around land rights administration.
Where a timeline is the visual material
How people made decisions on membership: "Who came in and why? Was anyone excluded and why? Who got residential sites? Who did not? Why?
How people made decisions on land use and allocation: "Tell us how you made decisions..." about specific situations relating to land use and allocation that people have mentioned.
Where land use maps or household maps are the visual material
Understanding rights of individuals: What does it mean to you to be owner / member / household head / member of a household / in terms of getting land and decisions about it?
Residential area: What is new here since land transfer? Has anyone new come to live here since land transfer? Anyone left? What happened to house / residential site? ---> should take us into transfer issues if they are there. Anyone died? What happened to house/residential site/field? Any payment made? Who paid and to whom?
Especially with small or female-headed households: How did you get your residential site?
Anyone using land who doesn't live here?
Around different land uses - fields, grazing, natural resources: Changes since land transfer? Who uses? Who doesn't use? Why / Why not? How were different land uses decided? How were land uses changed? How did you get to use... be part of ..... benefit from...? What sorts of disputes? [might be disputes about boundary, rightsholder, users...]
Around new services or infrastructure: Changes since land transfer? How were these developed and decided? What happened to people living on the affected land (if people were already settled)
Specific probes for getting into specific land rights administration processes
You might want to ask these questions to deepen our understanding of land rights administration processes that have not already come out in people's stories.
Application: How did you get to use ...? be part of ...? benefit from ...? What did you do first? And then...? And then...?
Records and recording systems, especially exclusive rights: How do you know what is yours and what is hers? How do you keep track of....? How do you know where boundaries are?
Adjudication: Any disagreements about who uses what land or for what purpose? Any disagreements about boundaries? What happened? (If resolved) Who made the decision?
Transfer: Has anyone new come to live here since land transfer? Anyone left? What happened to house / residential site? Probe stories of people leaving without a formal decision about what happens.
Land use regulation: For these different land uses, do you have any clear rules about what the users can or can't do? Examples where people have broken these rules? What happened?
Distribution of benefits. Distribution of benefits might come up in a timeline.... Check if issue comes out in probing differences in terms of what people get. Note that a failure to benefit from grazing or arable land may be related to a household not having labour or capital to use the resource rather than to active discrimination, but this is still a tenure issue.
To understand people's sense of trends (after summarizing a broad situation): What of this has changed since land transfer - for better or for the worse?
To understand people's own solutions, e.g. where they have named confusion on procedures or authorities: Where would you go to get clearer on what should happen?
To understand recourse issues: Where did you go for help? What was the outcome/decision? What do you think about the outcome/decision?
To get to substantive rights: Ask about who makes decisions at relevant points of change in land uses or who has land rights: e.g. allocation to relatives, sale, inheritance at the household level, or change in land use at the group/community level.
In using these probes don't forget
- In earlier meetings you want a broad picture, after which you can dig into what is really important.
- Keep referring to the timeline or the household maps or the broader maps or what people have named before - this keeps linking the abstract to the concrete, and the deeper discussion to named issues.
- Keep checking when things happened.
- Keep checking whether people are talking about what should happen (the rule) or what actually happened (the practice). To get into practice, ask "Give me an example when this happened? When did this happen?"
- Listen for the key tenure events: application, recording, adjudication, transfer, land use regulation, distribution of benefits