A wide range of audiences is envisaged for this document: collaborating institutions (implementing NGOs) and supporting agencies (funders); local, national and regional government institutions; other communities and NGOs, parastatals, the media, and academia.

The policy outputs are more formal and structured, but their format will vary widely according to their specific status. Normally, policy documents must be concise, practical and persuasively reasoned, setting out clearly the problem, the courses of action open to remedy it, the arguments for and against each option, and expected consequences of no action. However there are in each country processes whereby policy recommendations are prepared and absorbed into the system, and these can be so varied that even general recommendations or guides might be of little help on this point.

One possibility would be to prepare a clear and substantive synthesis paper, integrating the work of the policy analyst and the field team, in about 20 pages. This document would serve the purpose of being a policy issues paper: it could be circulated widely and for the basis of a national stakeholder workshop. The workshop could consider the paper, and other presentations, and then set up a working group to prepare formal policy recommendations to the appropriate authority.

Such a paper could be read in conjunction with the reference document, so as to indicate the underlying research findings and methods. It might have the following components:

• Executive Summary
• Introduction
• Project background
• Concepts: definitions, levels, sources, kinds of policy, process of policy formulation
• ASALs in the national context
• Description of ecosystem type, features, Strengths, Weaknesses, Options, Threats (SWOT) analysis, national priorities
• Key policy issues relating to ecosystem type
• Macro policies (e.g. decentralization, regional policies, development policies)
• Micro policies (local) e.g. grass burning
• Policy impacts on adaptive strategies—absence of enabling policies; supportive or disruptive policies
• Policies that would enable or support adaptive strategies for sustainable livelihoods—scenarios, options and recommendations
• Stakeholder analysis
• Monitoring and evaluation of policy impacts: indicators for measurement; means and sources of verification

A further derived policy output could be a cross-national policy analysis.