Watershed management and poverty – time for a rethink?

Why have many watershed management projects failed to deliver on poverty alleviation and resource conservation goals? Have development agencies over-focused on the needs of small farmers? How can project managers learn to work with all stakeholders to take into account land use capacity and its restoration and prevention potential?

A paper from the Overseas Development Institute’s Agricultural Research & Extension Network (AgREN) casts a critical eye over watershed management projects. Drawing evidence from how agencies responded before and after Guatemala was ravaged by Hurricane Mitch, plus from over 10 years of direct involvement in reviews of watershed management projects and from the available literature, it argues the need for a much more holistic approach.

‘Working with the poor’ – a much-used criterion for selecting watershed management activities and sites – has not been a very useful guide for shaping schemes. Poverty alleviation approaches have focused on individual farmers’ plots as the main planning units – rather than on the whole catchment area. From an overall watershed management perspective it is unfortunate that many agencies have prioritised working with the poorest segments of the population – rather than all the groups who benefit from and/or impact on the watershed.

Reviewing small-scale watershed projects across the globe, the report notes that:

• Most attempts to combat soil erosion in hillside areas use technical solutions to promote soil conservation, employing off-the-shelf technologies (primarily physical barriers and reforestation) and failing to adjust technology in response to inputs from farmers or the market.
• Poverty reduction and watershed management goals are often combined in a simplistic manner – natural resource management trade-offs are rarely discussed.
• By seeking to address as many constraints affecting poor farmers as possible, projects risk ending up with a long list of dispersed activities and non-complementary practices.

The paper argues that it is time that development organisations start treating farmers as informed clients capable of deciding what is good for them in the light of their resources, priorities and values. In order to switch from curative to preventive approaches to soil and water conservation, policy-makers are urged to:

• resolve conflicts of land use by facilitating dialogue between residents on the watershed and those downstream and ensuring the active involvement of all relevant local governments and institutions
• plan focused interventions, acting upon the points of highest leverage, which are often not obvious
• concentrate efforts in a few priority sub-­watersheds and communities to enhance impact, visibility, opportunities to observe and learn and potential repetition
• hone down a short menu of conservation-tested self-perpetuating practices that are appropriate for the use capacity of the land in question and that farmers will continue on their own even after the assistance promoting the practice has ended – targeting particularly those activities that produce a cash income
• do more to improve their and other stakeholders’ ability to learn from successes and failures, employ participatory monitoring, use data rather than assumptions and transfer knowledge through training, reporting and personnel rotation
• recognise that learning requires better mechanisms through which farmers can give feedback to the service providers and there is stronger accountability of the organisations to farmers, rather than only to donors
• explore the possibility of converting farmers from beneficiaries to clients by charging them for at least a small proportion of the services they receive.

Source(s):
‘Improving watershed management in developing countries: a framework for prioritising sites and practices’, Network Paper No. 129, Agricultural Research & Extension Network (AgREN), Overseas Development Institute, by Carlos Perez and Henry Tschinkel, July 2003 Full document.
‘What really works in watershed management?’ by Henry Tschinkel, October 2001 Full document.

id21 Research Highlight: 7 November 2003

Further Information:
Carlos Perez
1422 Experiment Station Road
Watkinsville, GA 30677
USA

Tel: +1 706 769 3792
Fax: +1 706 769 1471
Contact the contributor: cperez@uga.edu

Henry Tschinkel
Apartado Postal 17
Santa Elena
Petén
Guatemala

Tel: +502 926 3632
Fax: +502 926 3632
Contact the contributor: htschinkel@itelgua.com

Agricultural Research & Extension Network (AgREN)
Overseas Development Institute
111 Westminster Bridge Road
London SE1 7JD
UK

Tel: +44 (0)20 7922 0300
Fax: +44 (0)20 7922 0399
Contact the contributor: agren@odi.org.uk

AGREN, ODI, UK

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'Watershed development: what’s in it for India’s rural poor?'

'Water policy watershed? Rehabilitating rain-fed wastelands in India'

'Reaching a watershed? Local government reform and water management in India'

'Shedding light on watersheds. How to develop water resources and their use in drought-prone areas'

'Water and sanitation goals: Is progress in the pipeline?' Insights #45

'Tapping the market. Can private enterprise supply water to the poor?' Insights #37