User participation in watershed management and research

Abstract

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. An increasing number of watershed research projects are already participatory, however challenges remain to institutionalizing user participation in both watershed management and research.

Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) Approach for Watershed Management in India: A review

“…Nevertheless in the traditional system, local people were not regularly consulted in the design of top-down approach, which resulted in failure of projects in achieving the project goals. Watershed projects are more efficient and effective when users are agreed a role in managing their own watershed resources (Johnson et al, 2001). The active participation of users has a lot of implications for watershed management and research.…”

Complexity of Stakeholder Interaction in Applied Research

“…In a natural resource management context, research is predominantly applied in the form of management interventions, and natural scientists are increasingly acknowledging that, within a complexity paradigm, there ideally should be no distinction between management and research (Johnson et al 2002; B. Campbell, J. Sayer, P. Frost, S. Vermeulen, M. Ruiz Perez, A. Cunningham, R. Prabhu, S. Waddington, and E. Chuma, unpublished manuscript). Traditional mechanistic approaches to natural resource management in which 'technological problems' were identified by 'expert scientists' and then fixed with 'technological solutions' are simply ineffective (Lewis 1997, Pahl-Wostl 2002, Pahl-Wostl and Hare 2004.…”

“…Approaches need to allow all stakeholders to collectively and holistically generate an understanding of the complexity of the social, technological, economic, environmental, political system they are working within to jointly identify problems and to build trust as the basis for decision making and collaborative action (Pahl-Wostl and Hare 2004). This type of stakeholder interaction is fundamental to any natural resource management approach that acknowledges complexity, and that aims to effectively integrate and serve the needs of the natural resource system and the needs of the stakeholders who depend on that natural resource system (Johnson et al 2002). However, the effective implementation of this type of stakeholder interaction in natural resource management in South Africa still faces a number of challenges.…”

“…Participatory processes can easily entrench these power imbalances if they are not explicitly acknowledged and realistically dealt with in terms of negotiating skills, representation, language, resources available for preparation, e.g., power to consult a lawyer, and understand resource-use and access rights, prior to the participatory activity, and resources available for postparticipation follow up, e.g., power to contest negotiated decisions through other means (Leach et al 1999, Johnson et al 2002, Sansom-Sherwill 2006. Different stakeholders have different capacities to participate in different types of processes and spaces.…”

Community Watershed Management in Semi-Arid India: The State of Collective Action and its Effects on Natural Resources and Rural Livelihoods

“…The actual size of the watershed depends on topographic and agro-climatic conditions and may range from few hundred to several thousand hectares. Thus, the effectiveness of watershed interventions depends on the ability to treat the entire hydrological landscape, not just a portion of it (Knox and Gupta, 2000;Johnson et al, 2002).…”