The country survey is being undertaken during September – November 2007, guided by a four-person Steering Committee and led by a country project team of DBSA staff and consultants to undertake interviews and analysis, and some case studies. Various networks have been asked to distribute the questionnaireand over 50 returned questionnaires have been analysed.
About 50 interviews have been conducted. The interviewees were geographically disbursed and sectorally diverse in interests and specialist expertise and were selected on the basis that they were prepared to engage in a one possibly (1-2 hour) interview with one or more of the Country Working Group members.
Two key workshops have been organised:
A half a day workshop at DBSA to discuss the findings and to directly interact with various users to share information on the value of environmental tools. It will involve a select group of 10 participants.
A full day workshop will be conducted on Thursday 8 November in Stellenbosch (hosted by CSIR), following on from a conference of the South African branch of International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA – SA) in Somerset West. Presentations were followed by structured discussions around key identified issues. Click HERE to see photos from the workshop.
The findings of the workshops will be summarised as inputs to the country study report.
In addition opportunities for less structured and less formal discussion groups were sought by various DBSA team members and inputs from these discussions were fed to the drafting team.
Three diverse case studies are being analysed. The case studies focus on initiatives where a combination of tools have been used together. The opportunity will be explored to combine these case studies with the case studies the DBSA is undertaking in its own publication on Environmental management in Practice.
