Liberia : Methodology

Information gathering

Report Card information gathering took place in October and November 2010. Three civil society organisations participated in the data collection and compilation: Action Against Climate Change, Rural Integrated Centre for Community Empowerment and Human Concern Inc. Data collection was carried out over four weeks in October and November 2010 in six counties (See box). The key factors used to select the counties were proximity to forests and forest operations as well as availability and possibility of accessing existing forest sector information. Montserrado was selected because it hosts the headquarters of the Forestry Development Authority (FDA), where all official forest related information are housed and people in Monrovia have better access to communication including the internet. The other five counties host logging concessions and logging operations amounting to about 600,000 hectares combined or 60% of logging concessions in Liberia overall.

At the national level respondents were drawn from civil society stakeholder groups including NGOs, the private sector, and the media. Other respondents came from three state institutions including the ministries for justice, finance, and agriculture; the national legislature, the Public Procurement and Concessions Commission and the FDA. At the local level respondents included community based organisations, Community Forest Development Committees (CFDCs), key informants such as community opinion leaders, local government officials, staff of community radio stations, and local staff of the FDA and NGOs. A complete list of the stakeholder groups can be found in the Liberia report card background document.

Information gathering was based on the common template adopted by all Making the Forest Sector Transparent programme partners in June 2010, but extended to provide a methodology to capture community-level perceptions. This focused on recording participants' responses to each question with a "yes" or "no" under two labels: "Do you believe it exist?" and "Do you have it?" In the case where a participant has answered "yes" to a question under the label "Do you believe it exist?" she/he was asked a follow up question to provide the source under the label "Do you have it?" A total of 72 questions were administered covering 15 themes to the stakeholder groups described above. However, some of the questions did not reflect existing realities. For example, respondents new little or nothing about environmental and cultural services themes as their legal frameworks have not been developed. We ask these questions mainly to raise awareness amongst communities and within government institutions about their policy considerations. The questionnaires administered in the six counties primarily gathered perceptions of each respondent about all the questions. The information gathering team asked all respondents the same 72 questions. Information on factual results, which are compared across participating countries, was gathered through desk-based, FDA and related government institutions. Through direct one to one discussion and phone conversations different FDA and related government personnel provided information specific to the different themes of the questionnaires.

A total of 84 respondents across the six counties provided information for the 2010 data collection. This is an improvement over 2009 Report Card exercise in which 58 participated. One reason for seeking a larger number of respondents is in order to generate public interest in information availability about the forest sector by holding these kinds of discussions. The interviewers administered one questionnaire each to both FDA and Ministry of Justice personnel in Monrovia. In addition, the interviewers sought to ascertain updates from FDA personnel in Monrovia on key processes related to access to information and the National Forest Forum. They also requested information from the Ministry of Justice staff on the number of cases that the Ministry has received on forest related infractions, and asked them to present the field team with a list if such catalogue existed. In Cestos, Buchanan, Bopolu, Tappita and Zwedru the questionnaires were administered to local government officials and other forest stakeholders at the community level. Of the 84 respondents, 22 were representatives of government agencies, 15 were from local media, 13 from CFDCs, nine from Civil Society Organisations, seven from Community-Based Organisations, six from the three Liberian associations representing different groups of logging operators.