1.5.5.1 Issue of Relevance
An important underlying principle for the study was that the research should be relevant to policy. A difficulty was that the study emerged independent of formal institutional processes for agricultural commercialization. Despite this, the researcher made a conscious effort to secure support from selected key stakeholders. Stakeholder Analysis was a useful tool for this. Individual consultations were held with a number of institutional actors prior to site selection. Although the researcher assumed ultimate responsibility for the selection of specific sites for in-depth study, there was broad consensus on the selected sites. By contrast, site selection for the rapid appraisals relied largely on collective decision making and expediency. The reason was that, owing to the study’s logistical constraints, appraisals necessarily had to “piggy back” on external funding and processes by institutional stakeholders within the researcher’s informal ‘core support group’. This concession did not pose any difficulty though, since site selection criteria closely approximated the criteria earlier used by the researcher to select sites for in-depth research.
Another difficulty was that significant financial resources were required to fund a study that was deep and broad enough to be of relevance to policy and practice. The study began with funding to examine two in-depth case studies namely, Hereford and Phetwane. However, these two cases were too limited to be representative of the nationwide RESIS Programme, which in Limpopo encompassed more than 126 smallholder irrigation schemes. Towards enhanced rigour, therefore, the researcher sought and obtained additional funding to cover in-depth research on a third case study namely, Makuleke. In-depth case studies provided the desired richness of data, owing to time spent and trust relationships built over relatively longer time. However, contestations in Makuleke, Phetwane and Hereford posed threats and required adaptation of the research design in order to secure the requisite research space. Furthermore, results of these studies could not be sufficiently extrapolated to a broader scale. For greater representativity and relevance, there was a need to complement in-depth research with a rapid appraisal of a number of similar cases.
62 PLAAS provided valuable assistance in availing a large proportion of funding, mostly from the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights (NCHR), and strengthening links with the International Water Management Institution (IWMI). The researcher obtained further support from key stakeholders within a ‘core support group’ composed of intermediary institutions namely, the Water Research Commission (WRC), IWMI and, for the special case of Makuleke1, the Transboundary Protected Areas Research Initiative (TPARI). Through these organizations, the researcher mobilized additional research funding, convened workshops and actively engaged with stakeholders, particularly smallholders and rural communities. Such strategy accelerated the process of data collection, particularly for rapid appraisals, and enabled the researcher to meaningfully engage with stakeholders who would otherwise have been difficult to access. For example, where study sites were characterized by contestations, such as in Makuleke, the research became subject to the danger of being cast into particular ‘camps’ merely on the basis of the researcher having communicated with certain persons belonging to those camps. TPARI-funded community engagement workshops enabled the researcher to bring all key local stakeholders to one platform, facilitate discussions about relational issues between researchers and researched communities, reach a consensus on acceptable protocols of engagement and thereby obtain collective commitment of support.
1.5.5.2 Issue of Bureaucracy
A challenge was that bureaucratic red tape often encumbered communication and information flow between the researcher and stakeholders identified for the core support group. Officials often required the researcher to submit prior formal requests for information and superiors from above to give authorisation for them to provide it. Despite measures to formally inform key decision makers about the research and to request support, responses varied according to specific circumstances during programme processes and personal disposition of individual officials. Consequently, certain key documents were either delayed or inaccessible to research for reasons that were sometimes unclear.
Furthermore, while some of the government officials were helpful others did not feel obliged to support the research. A few of the latter cited the government’s Performance
1 Makuleke case was special in the sense that the community was considered and considered itself to have been ‘over-researched’ owing to the precedent-setting 1998 Settlement Agreement with the South African National Parks (SANParks) Board, following their restitution claim for land within the Kruger National Park.
63 Management System (PMS) as a hindrance to time spent attending to research issues, which were not part of their Key Performance Areas (KPAs) and therefore not recognized by accounting systems. The net effect of such constraints was that the research process often became bogged down by insufficient information.
1.5.5.3 Ethical Issues
The study was underpinned by an awareness of the ethical imperative for research to avoid entrenching the legacy of historical injustices in rural communities. These included the undermining of rural people’s rights and freedoms, silencing of local voices, extractive research practice and lack of accountability. The following principles therefore guided the research:
Principle of respect
Principle of historical awareness
Principle of reciprocity, mutual benefit and equitable sharing
Principle of process
Principle of full disclosure
Principle of differential needs and objectives
Principle of communication and due acknowledgement
Principle of acknowledgement of different types of knowledge
During the course of research, the researcher found it necessary to strengthen the proposed ethics of the study. This was due to observations that power dynamics, contestations and a general sense of disillusionment about prospects for amelioration of deprivation were increasing in most of the study sites. The last phenomenon seemed to be related to the broader national wave of violent social protests that gripped mostly urban informal localities and were highly publicized in the media (Tapela et al, 2011a). Although the likelihood of violent rural protests was low, there was a real danger that research could inadvertently be caught up in or contribute to local challenges.
Towards developing common understandings, local legitimacy and equitable best practice for the study, the researcher combined efforts with similarly concerned researchers in TPARI, linked up with an international discourse around the social and human dimensions of
64 conservation and protected area management2 and, through participative community engagement, developed guidelines to help social researchers and local people to develop workable and ethical agreements for social research (Tapela et al, 2007; 2009b). Such investment was invaluable to enabling the researcher to proceed through what increasingly became difficult terrain, particularly with the emergence and exponential increase in social protests in South Africa since 2004.
In engagements with members of rural communities, the researcher faithfully complied with ethical guidelines for social research (see Tapela et al, 2009b). For example, the purpose of the research was explained prior to commencement of research, local protocols for community entry were respected and respondents were alerted to their freedom not to disclose information they were not comfortable with providing and/or disclosing. Benefits of research were explained as a means towards managing expectations. Feedback was provided to key resource persons in rural communities and assistance given towards ensuring that communities generated longer term benefits from research. The last was achieved through workshops on policy engagement and stakeholder networking. By opening up such space for voices of smallholders to be heard, the researcher broke out of the usual mould of preserving ‘sacred’ platforms of discourse for elitist access by professionals and academicians.
Similar ethical principles were applied to engagements with institutional stakeholders. A particular challenge regarding this group, however, was tension between the study’s ethical requirement to avoid public exposure of information deemed detrimental to respondent officials (although in the public interest) and expectations by PLAAS and funding institutions, such as the NCHR, for the researcher to publicly engage with policy. The researcher found herself caught within such tension and often compelled to tread the fine line between protecting information sources and being accountable to PLAAS, funders and the South African public at large.
For both rural communities and government officials, the researcher devised a strategy to assess and distil critical policy issues, which were then handled through structured and
2This discourse emanated from the World Parks Congress held in Durban in September 2003, and culminated in an international conference or Indaba on Social Research and Protected Areas: Towards Equitable Best Practice and Community Empowerment, held at Skukuza in April 2005.
65 targeted engagements, such as issue-focused workshops and discourses. In such workshops identities of respondents were not disclosed, except where respondents expressed a desire for their names to be published and/or exercised their freedom to actively participate in open discussions. Other problematic issues were assigned to scientific papers and popular publications.
For rural communities, problematic issues included findings on rural livelihood strategies that were brazenly outside the ambit of formal legislation (i.e. criminal) as well as strategies that were criminalized by virtue of absence of institutional measures to redress past discrimination. The latter types of strategies were widely perceived to be legitimate and accepted within local communities, contrary to commonly-held views about the former.
Policy engagement on such issues sought to create awareness among institutional actors and a ‘safe-space’ for constructive responses to the plight of the rural poor and vulnerable.
By contrast, findings on observed and alleged irregular practices by institutional actors were more difficult to deal with. The researcher’s handling of such findings was guided by two practical principles. Firstly, if the need for in-depth investigation of alleged irregularities went beyond the purpose and focus of the study, then such work was deemed to be beyond the scope of the study. The second principle was that, where observed irregularities were deemed significant enough, the researcher would seek advice from relevant actors within the researcher’s ‘core support group’ of institutional stakeholders. As far as possible, identities of information sources were protected and diligence exercised in the handling of sensitive information. Such strategies helped the researcher to manage the more difficult terrains while retaining compliance with ethical guidelines.