Focus group approach
In each of the study areas, focus group meetings will be organized in which participants will be asked to provide their opinion about the use of indicators. The questionnaire of indicators (Table 1) will be administered to the participants. The proposed indicators will then be qualitatively evaluated using Multi-Criteria. This will lead to a short-list of indicators that stakeholders feel are most relevant and important and that they can easily use (or relate to) without extra training or equipment. In this way, we ensure that local indicators can be used easily and accurately by land managers themselves to monitor their progress towards sustainability goals. At the same time, using the same approach, policy-makers, stakeholders and researchers will work together to identify policy-relevant indicators at a national scale that can be measured using more technical approaches. The participants will be selected so that they represent major types of land users or policy makers in their respective study areas such as individual farmers, farmers unions, municipalities, NCCD, SMEs, NGOs, institutes, etc. The expected outcome of the focus groups approach will be the identification of candidate indicators to evaluate land management practices that impinge on and influence land degradation and desertification. In this way, the defined indicators will complement the conducted farm survey research.
The analysis of stakeholder perceptions will be based on an institutional analysis and the involvement of stakeholders. A comparative analysis will reveal if the perceptions of different stakeholder groups diverge and assess the potential of the current actor network to cope with desertification and resolve conflicts. It will be further explored if the overall awareness of the problem and key factors perceived by stakeholders are different from the results derived from the factual analysis.
