Needs Assessment in Land Administration: The Potential of the Nominal Group Technique

This paper introduces the Nominal Group Technique (NGT) for conducting needs assessments in land administration projects. Understanding the local context of what citizens, communities and organisations need remains a complex challenge yet fundamental to the success of land administration projects. To date, key methods of understanding and identifying local needs have been qualitative in nature with various strengths and limitations. For land administration, it is also important for empirical methods to attend to power imbalances amongst participants that are a hallmark and driver of land tenure security. Although NGT has hardly been used in the domain of land administration, based on our experience of employing the method in a research project in East Africa, we argue that it presents a valuable addition to needs assessment strategies. We provide a broad outline of the method before providing a detailed description of how we employed the method. We discuss the opportunities and challenges that NGT offers, arguing that it is a time and resource efficient way of engaging communities in a participatory and equitable process which facilitates the co-production of valid and reliable knowledge on needs, and consensus on how these needs should be prioritised.