A Toolkit for Participatory Action Research

Abstract

This Guide is drawn from experience in the action research project “Bottom-up accountability initiatives and largescale land acquisitions in Africa”. The project aimed to bring the international soft law instrument, the Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of the Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests (the Tenure Guidelines or TGs), to rural communities and, together with them, to use the Guidelines to strengthen their tenure of land, fisheries and forests. The ultimate goal of the project was to bring about bottom-up accountability in the context of large-scale land acquisitions in Africa. By looking at tenure challenges, and what the impacts of change are on different people (gender, generation, ethnicity, class), it was possible to identify sections of the Tenure Guidelines that were relevant to each case study. However, collecting and understanding this type of information requires a good understanding of decision- making and governance roles at local district, provincial and national level. The project sought, especially, to produce policy-relevant knowledge on how to promote legitimacy and accountability of public authorities.