2.1 | Selecting our cases
After deciding how our research was going to be carried out, we immersed ourselves in a pre-research about agrarian reform and ecovillages. At this point, academic papers, newspaper articles, videos and other materials available on the Internet about assentamentos and ecovillages were collected, skimmed, read or watched. Two initial interviews (through Skype™) were conducted—one with a Brazilian ecovillage founder and the other with a Brazilian bureaucrat from the Ministry of Agrarian Development, working on agrarian reform—in which basic information and materials were shared.
We then used the MST and Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) websites to select potential communities to visit. We decided to visit communities in Brazil and in Germany (in the latter, only ecovillages).
Given our instrumental collective approach, we understood it was important to have variance among our cases. Therefore, we chose to visit assentamentos and ecovillages with different conditions, histories, dates of creation, numbers of families and proximity to urban areas. Some of the communities we ended up visiting were not in our original selection, because they first appeared in conversations with interviewees.The decision to visit ecovillages in Germany was taken not only because we were living relatively close to them, but also because they are internationally recognized as role models for sustainability, where people from all over the world come to experience life in community and learn about technologies and practices geared towards sustainability.
We had initially chosen to visit 15 different communities: 10 ecovillages and 5 assentamentos. However, as the project progressed we opted to reduce the number of cases to 12 and settle on an equal distribution of communities. We thus visited 6 assentamentos and 6 ecovillages. Out of those 6 ecovillages, 2 were located in Germany.
>>> 2.2 | Collecting the data