Participatory Watershed Development

Efforts have long been made in India to improve the management of major watersheds for ecological reasons - such as reducing the siltation of reservoirs. The management of micro-watersheds (of around 500 hectares) is a more recent focus of policy and has both ecology and livelihoods as its objectives. Experiments have shown that, in some areas, more than a doubling of resource productivity can be achieved by careful rehabilitation. Many watersheds contain both private and common land. It is already clear from a number of efforts led by NGOs that, to be equitable and institutionally sustainable, the rehabilitation of both common and private lands needs action rooted in strong resource user-groups capable of taking decisions in a participatory way and resolving conflict. To build up groups in this way requires both time and skills, both of which have proved elusive in government projects and programmes.
The key question addressed in this book is how far the approaches developed by NGOs can be adopted (or adapted) by the public sector and applied on a wide scale, for, without such approaches, neither the ecological nor the livelihood benefits of watershed rehabilitation will be achieved.