Document Library

Key Text Good, Average, Bad: Law in Action

Author: R Johnstone et al
Date: 2005
Size: 10 pages (83.9 KB)

Access full text: available online

Summary

How can gaps between the intended and actual outcomes of legislation be addressed? This paper from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and Terra Firma gives an overview of their GAB (Good, Average, Bad) framework, a tool for scrutinising and improving the practical outcomes of legislation for marginalised communities. It describes the tool and its use in identifying ways to improve required community-concessionaire forestry negotiations in Mozambique.

In order to bridge the gaps, legal shortcomings must be identified and improved procedures must be put in place. To this end, the GAB offers a framework for the participatory assessment of the actual impact of legislation on rural populations in the field. It provides a means of identifying both problems and existing ‘good practices’ and identifies gaps in legislation by analysing compliance in relation to the formulation process, implementation mechanisms and enforcement capacity. In addition, it promotes learning so that experiences at the local level can be extrapolated to inform strategies at the macro level.

The GAB framework consists of eight sequential steps that build an accurate diagnosis of the reasons for varied outcomes of the same legislation in different cases:

Identification of legal provisions on community rights and benefits
Identification of provided implementation mechanisms
Identification of assessment criteria that ‘unpack’ the legal context for delivering the intended rights and benefits into a ‘checklist’ for evaluation
Selection of three case studies based on the perceived nature of their performance (good, bad and average) in relation to rights and benefits
Identification of the cause and effect of difficulties related to securing community rights and benefits and to what extent these are due to a ‘legal deficit’
Identification of differences in approach and strategy between the three case studies
Examination of the potential for cross-learning
Drawing of general conclusions aimed at meeting the identified gaps in existing legislation.

The successful application of the tool depends on the careful selection and application of the methods and techniques used to carry out the impact assessment and comparative analysis. As such, the GAB tool has a number of strengths and weaknesses:

It offers a way of gaining a systematic overview of the real impact of legislation on marginalised groups, whilst providing practical examples and potential solutions that can be discussed and developed further.
It is a way of simplifying the assessment of legal impact by examining analytically a cross-section of experience on the ground from the perspective of all stakeholders.
It is easily transferable to most legal contexts and can be adapted to help identify legal gaps of different natures.
Notwithstanding, this type of analysis can be demanding in terms of the methodologies applied at each step of the framework.
Furthermore, the results of comparative analysis could become overly reliant on qualitative evaluation of legal impact, while lacking in quantitative data. The preparation phase of legislation scrutiny and knowledge of different examples of implementation are a necessary prerequisite to successfully applying the GAB.

Access full text: available online

Source: Johnstone, R., et al, 2005, ‘Good, average, bad: law in action’, Power tools series, Terra Firma, Maputo, Mozambique and International Institute for Environment and Development, London, UK
Author: Rouja Johnstone , roujaj@hotmail.com ; Duncan Macqueen , duncan.macqueen@iied.org