Conceptualising a Socially Resilient Multi-Dimensional Framework for Bottom-Up Evaluation of Community Participation Mechanism in a Watershed Management Space

Abstract

In any integrated watershed management programme (IWMP), community participation is indispensable. The success of the community participation mechanism (CPM) correlates positively with IWMP accomplishment. However, unlike watershed success evaluation, CPM, in practice, is seldom evaluated, nor is there a theoretical framework developed to baseline such assessment from stakeholders' perspective. This paper conceptualises a socially resilient community participation evaluation framework (CPEF) for bottom-up evaluation of watershed CPM to bridge this knowledge gap. For identifying various critical domains and variables for CPEF from a socio-hydrological perspective, we studied Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) and IWMP programme policies and literature. Based on crucial watershed management actions, we built two constructs for the framework: (1) organisational - consisting of 36 organisational actions (OAs) in 10 domains of organisational management and (2) managerial – consisting of 46 critical management actions (CMAs) in 8 domains of management practices usually carried out in watershed space. This framework was verified in the IWMP areas of Brahmaputra valley in Assam, India. We applied a stratified structured questionnaire survey method to collect opinions of randomly sampled participants from three group of IWMP stakeholders' in four IWMP projects. We employed relevant statistical tests for analysing primary field data to obtain the most appealing set of community actions for the final CPEF. The results present an overview of the current state of CPM and a set of excludable actions. This evaluation framework methodology can be utilised to gauge community participation endeavour and improve cooperation, system redirection, and goal articulation in watershed space worldwide.