Participatory Watershed Management Research Articles

Overcoming limited information through participatory watershed management: Case study in Amhara, Ethiopia

This study highlights two highly degraded watersheds in the semi-arid Amhara region of Ethiopia where integrated water resource management activities were carried out to decrease dependence on food aid through improved management of ‘green’ water. While top-down approaches require precise and centrally available knowledge to deal with the uncertainty in engineering design of watershed management projects, bottom-up approaches can succeed without such information by making extensive use of stakeholder knowledge. This approach works best in conjunction with the development of leadership confidence within local communities. These communities typically face a number of problems, most notably poverty, that prevent them from fully investing in the protection of their natural resources, so an integrated management system is needed to suitably address the interrelated problems. Many different implementing agencies were brought together in the two study watersheds to address water scarcity, crop production, and soil erosion, but the cornerstone was enabling local potential through the creation and strengthening of community watershed management organizations. Leadership training and the reinforcement of stakeholder feedback as a fundamental activity led to increased ownership and willingness to take on new responsibilities. A series of small short term successes ranging from micro-enterprise cooperatives to gully rehabilitation have resulted in the pilot communities becoming confident of their own capabilities and proud to share their successes and knowledge with other communities struggling with natural resource degradation.

Spatial Information Tools for Land Use Management Networks in Montane Mainland Southeast Asia

This paper describes a participatory watershed management project which uses GIS-based mapping as a basis for dialog and collaboration between local communities and partner institutions in Mae Chaem watershed, northern Thailand. Through the participatory mapping process, local communities were able to document local patterns of resource utilization and changes over time. This allowed outsiders to better understand the context of land use and more clearly see the potential of the area. Output maps from projects such as this are important information resources for communities, local watershed management networks, local governance, and other institutions. Such maps can also provide a basis for dialog in efforts to solve problems and conflicts regarding natural resources management at different scales.

How sustainable is participatory watershed development in India?

AbstractWatershed conservation is widely recognized as a major strategy for rural development throughout the developing world. In India, the apparent success of participatory approaches to watershed development resulted in a decentralization of project planning, implementation, and management to local communities at the village scale. We explore the effectiveness of this so‐called community‐based approach in achieving sustainable soil and water conservation in four semi‐arid regions in India, and analyze what factors explain project success. We confirm the result of earlier studies that participatory approaches are more effective in establishing soil and water conservation in the short run. However, our main result is that investments in community organization fail to ensure household commitment to maintenance in the longer term. Without better returns to investment in soil and water conservation and without local institutions to coordinate investment in the long run, the sustainability of participatory watershed management is seriously threatened.

Rule compliance in participatory watershed management – Is it a sufficient guarantee of sustainable rural livelihoods?

In recent years, decentralised development approaches have been promoted to realise the goal of poverty reduction. In the agriculture sector, declining budgetary support and deteriorating quality of service provision by state parastatals the world over has prompted an interest in Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) and Joint Forest Management (JFM) policies. Donor-supported JFM and IMT projects have encouraged co-management between state parastatals and farmer groups or the private sector to undertake tasks of catchment protection, water allocation, collection of irrigation service fees (ISFs), and routine maintenance of irrigation infrastructure in a watershed context. Some evaluations of participatory watershed management projects assume that compliance with institutional rules would facilitate greater cost recovery, enhance agricultural productivity, and reduce dependence on government budgets, and may, therefore, be viewed as indicators of institutional success. But, based on an extensive survey and a detailed case study of participatory watershed management organisations in the Haryana Shiwaliks, we argue instead that institutional success may be evaluated on the basis of how much rule compliance has contributed towards an improvement in transparency of programme implementation, pro-poor benefit distribution, and condition of

Participatory watershed management (PWM): an approach for integrated development of rural India: a case study from Karnataka, southern India

Watershed management is an emerging concept for the efficient use of rain run-off in the rural areas of India. The approach to watershed management is participatory in nature, people friendly, location specific, processed based and geared to cater to the problems and needs of the rural communities. Operation of watershed management is ideal where the rainfall pattern is very short, uneven and there is no support of major and minor irrigation systems to enhance agricultural production. The principle of watershed management is the proper management of all the precipitation by way of collection, storage and efficient utilisation of run-off water and use of groundwater. The re-harvesting of run-off in the study area of watershed management is achieved by managing 25% of the total rainfall and 25% of the run-off to generate crop-growing area, through four re-harvesting mechanisms such as tanks, farm ponds, contour bunds and structures such as gully plugs and surface detention in depression. Participatory watershed management adopted in the study area promoted agriculture and allied operation and socio-economic development by achieving overall development of the villages.

Citizen Participation in Decision Making: Is It Worth the Effort?

It is widely argued that increased community participation in government decision making produces many important benefits. Dissent is rare: It is difficult to envision anything but positive outcomes from citizens joining the policy process, collaborating with others and reaching consensus to bring about positive social and environmental change. This article, motivated by contextual problems encountered in a participatory watershed management initiative, reviews the citizen‐participation literature and analyzes key considerations in determining whether community participation is an effective policy‐making tool. We list conditions under which community participation may be costly and ineffective and when it can thrive and produce the greatest gains in effective citizen governance. From the detritus of an unsuccessful citizen‐participation effort, we arrive at a more informed approach to guide policy makers in choosing a decision‐making process that is appropriate for a community's particular needs.

Bringing people's perceptions to project management desktops: a quantified participatory assessment of the Doon Valley Watershed Project in North India

A fairly simple, rapid and cost-effective methodology is presented for collecting quantitative and qualitative information from community assessments, based on user perceptions. Particular strengths of the methodology are the ability to collect information in the absence of baseline estimates and to collect quantitative information even on qualitative issues. Quantitative participatory assessment (QPA) builds on the methodology for participatory assessment (MPA). This paper presents the results of using QPA in a socio-economic and environmental impact assessment of a participatory watershed management project. The results compared favourably with the findings of more conventional impact studies that were carried out subsequently.

User participation in watershed management and research

Many watershed development projects around the world have performed poorly because they failed to take into account the needs, constraints, and practices of local people. Participatory watershed management—in which users help to define problems, set priorities, select technologies and policies, and monitor and evaluate impacts—is expected to improve performance. User participation in watershed management raises new questions for watershed research, including how to design appropriate mechanisms for organizing stakeholders and facilitating collective action. Management of a complex system such as a watershed may also require user participation in the research process itself.