The investigation needs to be prepared taking into account the resources available to carry it out. It is easy to assume, when deciding how to allocate resources for an investigation, that more is better: more time in the field, more data, bigger teams of investigators, bigger reports. This assumption should be avoided. Some of the advantages and risks involved in being ambitious - in terms of time devoted to preparation, fieldwork and reporting, team composition and size, and alternative logistical arrangements - are considered in the tables that follow.
Attempts to stretch the available resources to cover more communities or areas can easily lead to a superficial understanding. Focusing on fewer communities in more depth will generally reap greater rewards. Where it is important to understand a greater range of variation over more communities, it will often be preferable to carry out an initial investigation on a limited scale and then try to set up mechanisms that will allow investigations to continue as a ongoing process. This is discussed in more detail in the section on “Setting objectives”.
In many situations, key institutions and their linkages with household livelihood strategies may be similar across several communities or an area as a whole. Where this is the case, there may be less need to worry about covering a large number of communities. Once the analysis has been carried out in one place, findings can be verified over a broader area through more limited investigations that focus on those key institutions.
Table 2 - Assessing How to Use the Time Available
Investigators should be realistic about what they can do in the time available for their investigation. They need to decide on minimum objectives for their work, and make sure that they have enough time available to achieve those objectives. If the time seems limited, then they should consider modifying their objectives “downwards” and aim for quality rather than quantity. The time available for carrying out the investigation needs to be distributed in a balanced way between the preparation, the fieldwork, and the analysis and reporting. The advantages and risks associated with devoting more or less time to each of these three areas are reviewed below.
| |
Advantages |
Risks |
|
Preparation |
More time devoted to preparation means: |
but can also mean: |
|
Field work |
More time devoted to field work means: |
but can also mean: |
|
Analysis and reporting |
More time devoted to analysis and reporting means: |
but can also mean: |
Table 3 - Assessing Team Composition and Size
When a team is being assembled to carry out the investigation, three main issues need to be considered: the levels of skills and expertise on the team, the mix of discliplines and skills, and the eventual size of the team.
| |
Advantages |
Risks |
|
Levels of skills and expertise on the team |
Higher levels of skills and expertise mean: |
but can also mean: |
|
Mix of disciplines and skills on the team |
A greater mix of different disciplines and skills and on the team means: |
but can also mean: |
|
Team size |
Larger teams mean: |
but can also mean: |
Table 4 - Assessing Alternative Logistical Arrangements
Those planning the investigation should accurately assess the resources and level of logistical support at their disposal before planning the investigation. The objectives and coverage of the investigation should be tailored to the resources available and not attempt to do too much. Alternative ways of making use of resources and organizing logistics that need to be considered are staying in the community and covering a larger number of communities and areas.
| |
Advantages |
Risks |
|
Staying in the community |
Staying in the community means: |
but can also mean: |
|
Covering more communities and areas |
Covering a wider range of communities and areas can mean: |
But can also mean: |
Who takes part in the team carrying out an investigation will often be determined more by who is available than by the expertise, skills and experience that are ideally needed to carry out an investigation effectively. However, a few basic principles should be borne in mind when assembling the team.
Gender mix
Many institutions will affect men and women in very different ways or only involve one or the other gender group. In order to understand the respective roles of men and women, it is essential that the team is able to interact effectively with both. In some cultures, male team members may not encounter significant obstacles in talking to women, or vice versa. But often, women will only interact openly and freely with other women. This means that a balanced mix of men and women on the investigating team will usually be fundamental to carrying out an effective investigation.
Clearly, the gender composition of a team cannot substitute for a lack of investigative skills. Women and men on the team need to be chosen for their ability to contribute to the investigation, not just because they are either men or women. However, in some cases, special efforts and extra resources may be needed to ensure the inclusion of skilled female investigators. These extra efforts and resources are entirely justified and will usually be essential to the achievement of a useful result.
Qualifications and experience
The formal skills in doing field investigations of this type - for example, asking the “right” questions, being able to probe and interpret the responses, being sensitive to local culture - are generally associated with social scientists rather than people working in other, technical disciplines. Certainly, trained rural sociologists, anthropologists, socio-economists and specialists in rural communications should be able to make useful contributions to the investigation. But, as a general rule, field experience is likely to be more important than formal qualifications, and it should be recognized that not everyone with formal social science preparation will necessarily be in a position to contribute effectively. Often the most useful insights can come from relatively unqualified field workers who approach the investigation with an open mind, and are anxious to learn as much as they can. By contrast, highly qualified social scientists, or other specialists who may be convinced that they already know the answers before they go to the field, could end up contributing considerably less. So the team should be assembled looking not just at members’ formal qualifications, but their attitude as well.
The objectives for an investigation of household livelihood strategies and local institutions need to be tailored to the time and resources available. Particularly if the team involved has not had experience of this sort of investigation, it is almost certainly preferable to set limited objectives initially (studying a limited area or looking at just a few “key” institutions or livelihood strategies). Once investigators have achieved a better understanding of the issues, concepts and techniques, albeit in a limited area, it will be easier for them to design further investigations that will broaden and deepen their knowledge.
Both of the central topics of this investigation -household livelihood strategies and local institutions -are highly dynamic, as well as complex. This means that knowledge and understanding of them need to be constantly updated and renewed. Many aspects of livelihoods and institutions can only really be understood through extensive observation and contact, and not through a “one-off” investigation. So, wherever possible, investigators should try to use their initial work in the field to create learning mechanisms that will help them, or others, to continue to “investigate” in the future.
Often, creating these future opportunities for a continuing learning process will mean paying particular attention to the methods used during this initial investigation. One-off questionnaire surveys may generate much useful data but they may achieve little in terms of establishing the kind of rapport with local people that will help investigators continue to learn from them in the future. Participatory learning approaches, in which local people themselves learn and benefit from the investigative process, can create a more solid basis for these learning mechanisms, as local people are more likely to perceive the benefits they can gain from continuing collaboration and participation.
The literature that needs to be reviewed in preparation for an investigation of household livelihood strategies and local institutions can be divided into two categories.
1. Literature specifically addressing the issues and concepts behind the study, including:
literature on household livelihood strategies, both in the area under study and in general; and
This type of literature is most likely to be available in local university libraries, or in project and NGO offices, as well as on the Internet.
2. Documentation that does not specifically address the central issues of the investigation but is nevertheless valuable, including:
Historical information can help to understand how changes in the political, social, cultural and economic context may have affected people’s livelihoods and the institutions that help to sustain them.
Statistical information can help the investigators to determine the “frame” for their study: how many people do they need to talk to? how common are different forms of livelihood? how many people are likely to be affected by different types of institutions? what are the forms and the extent of rural poverty?
Anthropological studies, especially recent ones, may provide detailed descriptions of customs, beliefs and types of behaviour among different local population groups that are all part of local institutions.
Past projects may have worked on improving household livelihoods and have had to deal with local institutions. Reports, appraisal missions and project evaluations, as well as specific studies undertaken by projects, may contain valuable information.
Some of this literature will require “interpretation” as it may not specifically refer to household livelihood strategies and local institutions, but it is potentially valuable and may often provide a starting point.
Creating opportunities for flexibility
In an investigation of this type, a precise work plan may be very difficult to determine ahead of time. Rather than setting an exact timetable and plan of activities, the whole team needs to have a clear picture of the process they are undertaking and the steps that they need to go through in order to achieve their objectives. Modules 2 to 6 lay out examples of the process for different stages of the investigation, but the ability to adapt to conditions encountered in the field and, where necessary, change the order and even the content of the process is essential. Flexibility, so that new lines of investigation can be followed up as they are encountered, will be vital to success.
Creating opportunities for interaction with the community
The investigation will look at issues that are often quite “intimate” and close to the hearts of rural people. It is unrealistic to expect people to be completely open with outsiders about their habits and norms of behaviour if they have not had the chance to get to know the investigators and feel at ease with them. Planning the investigation so that there are many opportunities to interact with the community outside of the investigative activities being carried out will reap benefits in this regard. One obvious way to do this is to ensure that the team can stay in, or near, the communities where they are working. Often, a very different “story” will be heard over a cup of tea in the local tea shop in the evening compared to what people say when they are being “interviewed”.
Creating opportunities for reflection and review
Regular opportunities for the investigating team to meet, discuss their findings and adapt their investigation in response to what they are learning should be considered an integral part of the investigation. These regular team meetings, or workshops, are vital to keep track of the large amounts of information that will be collected, and to identify areas where new issues are arising or where there are gaps or contradictions in the findings. Particularly when combining quantitative and qualitative methods of investigation, it will also be necessary to keep track of the different methods that have been used to collect information on different issues.
These regular meetings can also significantly accelerate the process of reporting on the findings as some of the analysis and presentation of findings can be carried out as the field work progresses. This allows data to be “processed” when it is still “fresh” in the minds of the people who have collected it and will leave less work to be done at the end of the investigation.
Suitable venues for carrying out these regular meetings, their frequency and the availability of key resources (like writing materials and flip charts) need to be planned ahead of time.
Placing the investigation in context
The investigation should not be thought of as an isolated “episode” but as a continuing learning process that may be initiated during the study but should then continue throughout the period when development workers are implementing their programmes in a particular area. When planning the investigation, the ways in which the people and institutions involved can link with future development work should always be considered. For example, if the investigation is organizing focus group discussions in communities involving particular stakeholder groups, those focus groups can become channels for future development interventions, or might constitute “contact points” that can be involved in future monitoring and evaluation activities for development work. In particular, the investigation should be used as an opportunity to understand how information about the impacts of development activities can move from the households that are the “targets” of those activities up to those making decisions about how those activities are implemented, and vice versa.
From the FAO Guidelines and Dewi’s experience, Musa realizes that there are many aspects of local institutions that she and the team probably will not be able to fully understand in such a short period. To deal with this, Musa and her colleagues set two key objectives for the study: (1) to establish a basis of understanding of linkages between livelihoods and institutions that will help the project start working in the field; (2) to establish a mechanism that will enable them and their colleagues to continue learning about the more complex aspects of local institutions as the project progresses.
The team sets to work on the literature review. They divide up their tasks: Musa covers the university library and other sources in the provincial capital, as this also gives her a chance to talk to Dewi and her supervisor at greater length and understand the issues that have to be covered. Her discussions with Dewi and other researchers help clarify her thinking considerably, but a lot of the literature she collects seems very theoretical, and she is not sure how to transform it to help the investigation. Still, she uses her reading, and the FAO guidelines, to put together a tentative structure for the investigation. She also finds some (rather old) papers by a foreign anthropologist who spent several years working in coastal villages in Malatuk. These contain valuable information on local ethnography, customs, traditions and traditional institutions, fisheries and farming systems.
Ravi uses his contacts with local NGOs to gather reports on NGO studies carried out in the project area and to look for anything relevant that might have been done by the national NGO community on livelihoods and institutions. From a local NGO involved in the development of agricultural cooperatives, he collects a useful study of “village level cooperation and local institutions” carried out a few years before. From her time as a health worker, Diane is familiar with many of the government offices in the area, various surveys that have been done and most of the official statistics available. She manages to assemble a considerable body of fairly up-to-date statistical information, including voter lists from the recent elections and the accompanying census, and the results of some large surveys carried out by relief organizations.
Daniel’s interest in local culture and history prompts him to volunteer to try and dig up any materials that might be available locally on the history of the area and the different communities and people living there. Daniel points out that much of this knowledge may not be written down but says that he can talk to some of the more knowledgeable people he knows and record what they tell him. Musa, worried that he may just end up telling the rest of the team everything he knows, checks a list of key informants for him to meet and what they will talk about. He comes back with a lot of fascinating information about local history and changes in local institutions. He obviously has difficulty in extracting concise “findings” and tends to want to recount everything word-for-word, but Musa emphasizes to him that there simply will not be enough time during their investigation to describe everything they see and hear. He quickly gets the idea and, like the rest of the team, prepares a concise review of “key learning”.
Once they have gone over the literature, they spend the next half-day trying to clarify what it is that they are actually trying to study. Musa uses the diagrams described in Module 1 of the FAO Guidelines to go through all the key concepts. The idea of household livelihood strategies seems to be relatively easy for people to understand, and Musa is quite surprised at how quickly her team grasps the main concepts. But when the discussion turns to “local institutions” they encounter more difficulty. From Module 1 in the guidelines, they are able to get a general idea of what is meant by “institutions”, but everyone on the team has some difficulty in working out the differences between “institutions” and “organizations”. When they start discussing what the guidelines call “processes”, the whole issue seems to become very complicated. In the end, as suggested in the guidelines, they use the diagram in Module 1 to go through some of the different institutions they know they will encounter in communities in Malatuk and discuss the different “attributes” of those institutions. Ravi suggests that they focus on what these various institutions actually do and the effect they have on people. Musa agrees with him that they can worry about definitions later once they have understood the institutions themselves. This discussion helps to clarify things enough so that they can get down to more detailed planning.
One of the first problems they have to deal with is deciding where to carry out their study. From the literature they have looked at, it is clear that there is considerable variation in the forms of institutions found in different areas and different “types” of communities. In the time available, they cannot possibly cover the entire range. Musa decides to concentrate on a limited range of communities where she knows that her technical colleagues are thinking of introducing pilot activities. The information they have is sufficient for them to identify a few types of communities. In the lowland areas, agricultural communities seem to have relatively similar sets of institutions, and people’s patterns of livelihood are reported to be fairly uniform. The main differences seem to depend on relative distance from the provincial capital and the amount of migration from particular areas. However, in a few areas the situation is much more complicated. In the large floodplain area near the main river running through the province, there are a number of specialized communities exploiting different niches in the floodplain environment - river and lagoon fishers, floodplain farmers, hunting and gathering communities from different ethnic backgrounds. In the hills in the interior, the situation is even more complex, with at least 20 different hill tribes each with their own language and institutions. Coastal fishers also belong to a distinct socio-economic and cultural group. The MPAP’s priority areas have been determined as those most vulnerable to natural disasters, of which cyclones (affecting the coast) and flooding (affecting the floodplain) are the most important. So the team decides to focus, at least for now, on these two areas.
Musa and her team discuss the objectives they have set for the investigation with the team leader. He agrees that it is better not to be too ambitious initially and to focus on just a few communities. He is particularly enthusiastic when Musa explains the team’s idea of trying to set up mechanisms that will enable them to carry out their investigations as a continuing process. He encourages them to link up with the monitoring and evaluation cell of the project and discuss with them how ongoing investigations of household livelihoods and local institutions might become the basis for a monitoring system that would involve local people. They also talk to the technical specialists on the project who have already been out in the field looking for opportunities for technical sub-projects. Together with them, they identify a shortlist of communities in the coastal and floodplain areas where her colleagues are eager to initiate work.
This gives the Musa and the team a basis from which to start working. They get down to planning the first phase of their investigation - a profile of the communities where they are going to work.
To identify more precisely the communities where they will carry out their investigation, they decide to carry out a short, three-day reconnaissance, looking at the shortlist of communities they have drawn up and then selecting those that seem most appropriate.
They agree beforehand on a short series of key factors that need to be considered in choosing the “right” communities for their investigation. They decide that during this reconnaissance they should identify communities that are not too large or complex but where local people are engaged in a variety of livelihood strategies, such as different types of agriculture, fishing and trading. Daniel reminds them that the willingness of the local people to take part in the investigation will also be a key factor. They identify some potential “key informants” - local leaders, traditional heads, government and NGO workers - who are familiar with the two main areas they have decided to target and, armed with this and some simplified maps of the areas and communities they are interested in, they set off for the field.
Their first stop in each area is with the local authorities, who have already been informed of their intentions. They explain the purpose of their visit and the investigation they are planning and clarify how it will contribute to the MPAP, which everyone already knows about. Next, they split up into two groups to visit their key informants. With them, they use their checklist of “key factors” to guide their discussions and are able to get a good, general picture of the area and the characteristics of the different communities they have short-listed. One of their key informants, a government officer in a subdistrict office, also directs them to the head of a local women’s organization. She gives them a clearer picture of the condition of women in the floodplain area where she is active. As a result, they realize that they know very little about women in the coastal communities, so they make a note that this will require special attention when they are working there. They use the maps they have of the areas to talk through with their informants how the communities in the area are distributed and how they differ from one another.
Based on these interviews, they narrow down the choice of communities to three communities in each area and head off to visit them. They introduce themselves to the village heads in each community, explain the investigation and ask to be “shown around” each village. They are nervous that they may raise expectations in these communities, so Musa has carefully prepared an explanation of the investigation that makes it clear that there is no guarantee that participation by the community will mean that project activities will take place there.
In the floodplain, they end up deciding on the community that they originally felt was least likely to be suitable. The village of Baraley is relatively remote and requires a one-hour boat trip to get there, but they are convinced by the fact that people are enthusiastic and interested and seem to have had little experience of studies or surveys. By contrast, the other two communities in that area seem to be suffering from “survey fatigue” as a result of past projects in the area. On the coast, the choice is more difficult. They discover that the “villages” they have identified are really just administrative units and that these are made up of smaller communities, each with apparently different characteristics, livelihood patterns and institutions. In the end, they select a series of these small communities that are relatively close together and appear to have considerable interaction, even though they spread across two administrative “villages”, Cosuma and Yaratuk.
From this initial field trip, they already realize that they are having difficulty explaining to people what they mean by “local institutions”. When they use the word “institution”; people always assume that they mean formal organizations like schools and government offices. The team has difficulty explaining that they also mean less “visible” institutions, like religious observances, local rules and regulations and customary law. So they realize that they will have to avoid asking direct questions, such as: “What institutions influence decisions about using land?” Instead, they decide to approach these issues more indirectly, asking questions such as: “How are decisions taken about land use?” and “Who makes those decisions?”
