Such a procedure allows local design of country projects within the overall rubric, leading to greater relevance to the specific situation and to greater practicality of implementation. A process of competitive bidding would also give the sponsoring organization the opportunity to select country projects on the basis of individual merit and also create a "best mix" of different countries and sites that would contribute to the overall project objectives.

Serious consideration should be given to providing some resources up front to enable NGOs to undertake site selection and to hold a preliminary local workshop. Modest financial resources for the purposes of local project preparation could be awarded possibly on the basis of a first submission of a country issues paper that also addresses the criteria of area and site selection, based on literature and existing field knowledge. Organizations that prepare proposals of sufficient merit, explaining what sites they have selected, by what criteria, and how they would conduct their research, and how their outputs would be used, together with a satisfactory agency profile, could be invited to present their proposals for review at the first workshop. At this workshop a jury, perhaps the advisory group, selects projects for funding.

An additional advantage can be gained by allocating generous time and adequate resources to enable NGOs to undertake preliminary studies in stage 2. The project documents, and the ideas, hypotheses, concepts and terms they contain, may appear perfectly clear to the writers in metropolitan countries. They may appear on first reading to make perfect sense to prospective researchers in a given country. But when those same readers sit down (or better still, travel out) to test the concepts in a particular field situation, that which had appeared simple at first reading can become quite problematic in real life, particularly where the need for local translation forces precise thinking. Collective discussion of problems at an early stage, first within country teams (stage 2), and later at a combined workshop (stage 3), can help to refine and point out concepts, expose ambiguities, and serve to make productive the crucial fourth stage of the project (the substantive field work and policy research).