Community Case Studies

Community Case Study Project

TOPIC: Rural communities and Natural Resources. The Power of Knowledge and its Influence on Decision-Making

STEPS: -Those of you who have direct experience working with communities will share a one page summary of how level and type of knowledge has influenced the decisions that have affected the lives of the communities you work with.

-Those of you who do not work directly with communities can think of a one page reflection of the influence of information on decision-making (maybe think of key debates you have seen in the press and the media, or maybe at the level of the institutions where you work or study).

-Once you have written your one page case study or reflection, try to stablish correlations between amount and quality of information available for communities and how this influenced the results (i.e. inequality, loss of natural resources, creation of factions and conflicts within the community or between communities, loss of traditional livelihoods, or on the contrary, if the community actually did well, what role did the available information/knowledge play in those positive results).

-Please send your one page case study/reflection to the members of the group on sunday night so everyone has a chance to read everyone's imput on monday morning before classes begin.

-After revising all the information, let's aim for a meeting over lunch or in between times on monday. The objective of the meeting is to collectively work on the outline of a publishable paper and provide the central argument of the paper and draw comparisons between our case studies (similarities and differences), and if possible draw some genral conclusions thinking of the broader implications of the relationship between inequality and development in rural communities. This will be what we use when presenting our results to the rest of the class. If something else is needed we can talk about it as we go.

GOAL: Outline of publishable research paper.