Selection of Respondents and Sample Size

I started with the project managers in Austria and Ethiopia to select the scientists, and then I followed their recommendations in a snowball system (see table 2.1). This also led me to interview policy-makers and NGO representatives. I tried to achieve a representative sample of different education levels, careers, gender, age and nationality, but this was constrained by the fact that the respondents should have had some affiliation to and ideally practical experience in the case studies. In spite of my best efforts, the representation of female respondents was poor, especially among scientists, policy-makers and donor representatives. I tried to at least

9 Each administrational sub-unit of a district (= kebele) in Ethiopia has been assigned three development agents to assist the communities in their development activities in the fields of agriculture, livestock and natural resources.

invite an equal group of women for the focus group discussions (FGDs). But when asking for female scientists, I was repeatedly told that there were no female scientists in the research organisations. Therefore I could only include women whom I already knew personally.

In the villages my starting points were the project managers and the local DAs. Initially I held a meeting with a small group of farmer representatives. The criteria for selection that I told the DAs were gender, wealth, age and an interest in trees and soil. These farmers were also intended to be my initial key informants. Their role was to provide an entry point, and to help me to get to know their villages in terms of its social structures as well as the agro-ecological context. However, it turned out that the key informants were often model farmers or village chairmen, close relatives and dominantly male and rich. Therefore I decided not to apply snowball sampling to select farmers for interviews.

I then selected the respondents for individual interviews based on the village maps (see 2.2.3.3). The criteria for selection were: representative in terms of age, gender, wealth, landownership; connection to projects; model farmers and/or key informants; farmers with other functions in the village and farmers without such attributes; location of household in the village area; if applicable ethnicity; duration of residence in the area; female-headed households; people seen as knowledgeable by the community. The latter was important because in talking to people outside of this ‘category’ I could see the differences between what some people considered as ‘knowledgeable’ as compared to others.

Table 2.1 presents an overview of the actual sample for all respondents. The majority of the scientists and policy-makers were Ethiopian and had some study experience abroad. Among these many did their masters and/or doctorates or PhDs at BOKU University in Austria, others in Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands, Cuba, UK, Kenya, US, Switzerland, Russia and Spain.

Regarding their expertise, many of them were foresters, others were specialists in soil and water conservation, and few were specialised in other bio-physical areas and social sciences.

Only about 25% claimed to have a background in farming, and only two out of the whole sample for scientists and policy-makers (n=37) were women. Three were aged above 65, the majority was between 30 and 45 years old.

Table 2.1: Actors and number of respondents

Actors Respondents in case studies Respondents in the policy context of

the case studies Number of respondents

Farmers

Farmers, project contact

farmers (69)* Local and regional institutions (church,

social institutions) (6)** Galessa:

Austrian project manager (2) Other researchers at BOKU University

(3) Austria: 5***

Interviews: 3 FGDs: 4 Landscapes: 4 Ethiopian project manager (2) Other researchers at research

organisations in Ethiopia (ARARI, GARC,

project coordinator (1) Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture (2) NGOs (2)

Note: Farmers = respondents of key informant interviews, SSI and on-farm visits, participatory mapping, seasonal calendar and village walks, landscape ranking; others = respondents of interviews, FGDs and landscape ranking

* This number counts only the interview partners, as the participants in FGDs or landscape rankings were often the same people as the ones already interviewed.

** Some of the farmers interviewed were members of social institutions, or chairmen of such institutions. It is therefore difficult to say how many members of such institutions I have interviewed, as they also count as farmers.

*** This number is lower than in Ethiopia because these were the only Austrian scientists directly involved in supervision and research related to the case studies. 3 out of 5 were interviewed, and 4 out of 5 participated also in the FGDs and landscape ranking.

**** These are only the scientists I interviewed personally. For each FGD there were additionally 5 ARARI, 7 HARC, 6 GARC and 10–15 FRC scientists participating. The number of participants at FRC was unclear because people kept on moving out from the discussion.

Regarding the case study sites, table 2.1 gives an overview on the overall sample size. Galessa Koftu is comprised of 526 households. While key informants were interviewed in all six villages belonging to the watershed (14 key informant interviews in seven villages: Abeyi, Tiru, Sombo, Gebi, Toma, Kamate, Ameja), most of the research focused on the villages of Tiru and Sombo in the watershed, and one village outside (Abeyi). These villages had 27 households (Tiru, Sombo) and 40 households (Abeyi) respectively. The number of in-depth interviews was 33

(including the key informants) with respondents in three villages (Abeyi, Tiru, Sombo); six of them were repeated for clarifications and additional information. The respondents were 20 men and 13 women; of these, eight were female-headed households. Among the respondents 15 people had their birthplace outside of Galessa. Almost all were Oromiffa speaking, and five spoke Amharic as a first (one person) or second language (four people). Almost one-third of the respondents were between 30 and 40 years old.

The number of households in Woglo and Wojnie was 263. FGDs were held separately with men and women in the two villages. At the beginning of the research in Ambober one key informant meeting with three representatives of the two villages (Woglo, Wojnie) took place in February 2010. Another key informant meeting with four representatives of the two villages in Gondar was held in February 2012. I held in-depth interviews with 36 farmers, including the six key informants, in two villages (17 in Woglo, 19 in Wojnie) and talked to at least four of them repeatedly. The respondents were 26 men, ten women; of these, nine were female-headed households. The largest age group was between 50 and 60 years old. Fourteen people (about 40%) had their birthplace outside of their current village. Additionally there were four whose parents had not been born in the area but had moved to Ambober before they were born. All were Amharic speaking. According to their birthplaces, the people who migrated to Woglo and Wojnie in the current or previous generation were of mixed descent, but according to their origin were most probably Qemant, Faqui (leather workers) and Asmari (singers); some of them were also of Oromo origin because many Oromo who were Derg soldiers from the southern parts of Ethiopia stayed in the Azezu area after the downfall of the Derg.