Introducing the concept of a ladder of watershed management: A stimulus to promote watershed management approaches

Abstract

Watershed Management (WM) as an ever-evolving process should be defined and developed with its approaches. These approaches, which are developed over time, are the main guiding elements of this process to achieve watershed health and sustainability. In this regard, Fragmented WM (FWM), Integrated WM (IWM), and Comprehensive WM (CWM) were identified as the main Watershed Management Approaches (WMAs) based on the literature review. Each main approach also has a set of sub-approaches that are necessary to achieve its goals. The interdisciplinary, watershed, research-executive, integrated, participatory, decentralized, nexus and adaptive approaches are types of these sub-approaches, which are called Subsequent Approaches (SAs) in this article. In this article, the concept of A Ladder of Watershed Management is proposed as a stimulus to promote WMAs based on the hierarchy of the main approaches and their SAs. This ladder illustrates a gradual and step-by-step process for promoting WMAs. The most important function of this ladder is to answer three significant questions: (1) at what rung of the ladder do countries stand based on their WMAs?; (2) what is the next rung?; and (3) what should be done to move to the next rung? In general, after identifying the current and future SAs of WM using this ladder, it is necessary to consider the legal and policy infrastructures and approach-based environmental initiatives to operationalize the WMAs.