Land-related Conflicts in Acholiland, Northern Uganda: Qualitative Data from a UN Study Mapping Land Conflict, 2012-2015

The methodology involved seeking data at rural Parish level. A Parish is an administrative division under the administration of an elected council (Local Council 2 / LCII). Parishes are made up of Villages or Sub-wards under the administration of an elected Local Council 1 / LCI, the smallest government administrative entity. LCII courts were also the first formal land dispute resolution bodies. It was decided to focus exclusively on rural parishes on the basis that the nature of land administration, landholding and land disputes in urban areas is quite different to that in rural areas and would necessitate an entirely different methodology to monitor and map. Moreover the vast majority of the Acholi population is rural.
The rural Parish-level focus provided a parameter or definition of sorts of the disputes we were measuring: those that were known about and considered problematic at Parish level. However success depended on consistency, which in turn depended on our respondents grasping the purpose of the exercise and responding in the approximately the same way across the Sub-region. It is possible that numbers will have been distorted by the fact that Parish-level leaders are also residents, and thus may include village, sub-village, and family level disputes from their own locales that would not otherwise qualify as Parish-level events. However we concluded that such distortions are likely to play out fairly consistently, while having groups of, on average, three from each parish, representing different sectors (customary and local council) would reduce these. Typically a Parish has a population of around 5,000 people and on average is made up of ten Villages, although this varies dramatically across the sub-region, with fewer, larger villages in the western and northern districts. It was our assumption that while leaders of such a population would be unlikely to know every adult or every nuclear household, they would be aware of all clan and extended family groups within the area, and would be part of a network of local leaders and family heads responsible for addressing problem conflicts. Through this they would become aware of most land conflicts that were protracted or causing concern at lower levels.
Five research tools were developed: 1) Parish-level Disputes Form (PDF) seeking overview information on numbers of recent and current disputes, numbers of disputes involving violence, numbers of disputes involving 10+ households; and organisations or individuals important in resolving land disputes; 2) Individual Dispute Questionnaire (IDQ) aiming to capture detailed information on as many recent or current disputes as each parish group could manage to complete (this is the data shared here); 3) Parish Village List (PVL) form to identify all villages in each parish; 4) Village-level Form (VLF) on land tenure, land use, and any clan(s) associated with the village and with recognised land rights there; 5) Outline parish maps on which participants were asked to draw approximate village boundaries, and where possible additional detail including clan distribution.
Data was collected through a team of Acholi-speaking researchers mobilising groups from each parish, typically consisting of the LCII Chairperson, an elder with broad local knowledge of customary land issues and a third person with local land expertise from either the customary or LC sectors. These individuals were identified with the help of Sub-county (LCIII) authorities and brought together for one or two days in each of two research rounds in Sub-county-wide meetings. While LCII Chairs were invited to bring records of the land cases heard by their courts with them, this rarely happened, probably because in most cases such records did not exist.
The methodology had the strength that the informants generally had extensive knowledge of land matters and specifically land disputes and customary land holdings in their Parishes. On the other hand, is important to recognise that these informants often had little formal education, were sometimes not literate or numerate, and were usually providing information from memory. In this context it is important to understand that information especially around dates, time periods and specific numbers is likely to be impressionistic rather than precise. Notwithstanding these limitations, we are aware of no source of more accurate information on these matters.
Two rounds of data collection were undertaken: in February / March 2012 and in August / September 2012.
Recording mobile phone numbers of respondents allowed me with the assistance of two experienced Acholi-speaking researchers to re-contact them to up-date and clarify information in the IDQs. In January 2014 we identified all conflict records involving a woman or female headed household as either or both parties to a dispute (202). The rest were up-dated, again through phone interviews between August and September 2015.

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