Abstracts
and full text of case studies about sustainable rural development and
NRM in Sub-Saharan Africa at Geo
e-Links Africa
Putting
case studies on the map
The DEVECOL
information system recovers case studies and other site-specific studies
from the 'grey' literature, limited edition journals, professional files,
and other repositories, including online sources. The individual studies
are geo-referenced. The system makes it possible for the documents to
be searched according to key environmental parameters - climate, terrain,
and soils - by means of digital maps. This is the ecological filter
that is unique to the DEVECOL information system, which at the present
has focussed on Sub-Saharan
Africa.
Case studies
of local experiences are a key information resource for sustainable
development. Thousands of local development and research efforts have
been documented as case studies or similar site-specific studies, e.g.
project evaluations and research findings. The case study approach has
been periodically employed to survey and document experiences and to
derive generally applicable lessons for introducing improved varieties
of crops, animals or trees; promoting soil and water conservation; recovering
from drought disasters; or to achieving socially and economically viable
management of watersheds or protected areas, to name only a few.
Site-specific
studies can be seen as the building blocks of sustainable development,
providing the foundation for manuals and guidelines as well as policies.
Individual documented experiences are also of value to field workers.
They serve to anchor in reality the technical recommendations of manuals
or the interpretations of an area's development problems or potentials
derived from statistical or cartographic analyses. Existing case studies
also can help to assess or validate the appropriateness of a contemplated
action if they record that action in a similar situation or nearby.
However,
unlike manuals or guidelines, case studies are not easy to access. They
tend to be invisible to electronic searches. This is because the individual
studies are often published in an annex or as individual chapters in
an anthology. The titles of 20 individual studies could obviously not
be included in a document's database record. Other case descriptions
are unpublished and absent from electronic bibliographies. Also key
words corresponding to universally applicable ecological descriptors
are not used in document database records while full text searches may
find none in the document itself. A quest for a solution to the lack
of ecological key words is the origin of the DEVECOL map-based information
management system (See the Background
Papers for more detailed analysis of these issues.)
updated:
10/30/2004
