T. Michaelsen
Tage Michaelsen is Forest Conservation Officer, FAO Forestry Department.
People's participation is gradually being recognized by government agencies as an essential component in the implementation of watershed management efforts in inhabited upland areas. The policy prevailing 30 to 40 years ago of nationalizing natural resources such as forests and rangelands is gradually being replaced by an understanding that conservation of natural resources is best ensured if local communities are directly involved in their management and receive guaranteed benefits as a result of their conservation and rational utilization.
This change in outlook, however, is occurring only with a great deal of reluctance, and mainly because it is becoming evident that the attempt by the state to "enforce" the conservation of natural resources has largely failed to produce the desired results on a sustainable basis. In some cases, the national forest services, national parks services, etc. may see the new orientation as confusing and even threatening to their traditional sphere of responsibilities and sources of income. However, these institutions could gain a great deal in terms of popular and political support by developing into institutions for the service of rural people. Foresters would find themselves much more in demand as a result of a community forestry approach than in their old role as protectors of a dwindling resource base.
Over the past decade, watershed management has evolved from a government concern with mainly public land management to a situation where the watershed population is seen increasingly as the active partner with government agencies being placed in an advisory and supporting role. There are several reasons for this: forest protection through policing by forest guards and nationalization of forests in order to protect them have largely failed; watershed populations and pressure on upland resources have increased as populations during the twentieth century have doubled every 25 to 30 years; resettlement programmes have proved to be very costly and generally socially unacceptable; pilot projects based on government funds, daily paid labour, etc. have generally turned out to be costly and short lived.
Watershed management staff are now increasingly aware that elements traditionally considered beyond the scope and the area of interest of a project - for example land husbandry - may play a decisive role in the watershed. Food price policies and subsidies may favour certain crops or make them unprofitable to grow; emphasis on export crops may force subsistence farmers on to increasingly marginal land; insecure land tenure may make farmers more interested in occupying land than in sustaining its long-term production capacity; management of communal land is becoming a worldwide concern.
However, local populations and their representatives are still only rarely involved in the design and planning stages of watershed management projects. Most watershed planners still work in top-down centralized government departments and therefore find it difficult to respond simultaneously to demands for better, faster planning and project formulation for the nation's priority watersheds, and to the need to involve local leaders in project design. Furthermore, most financing and technical assistance agencies, national as well as international, still insist on a detailed project document before authorizing funds for project activities, including those that would involve local people. There is therefore a clear need for the decentralization of government agencies, the creation or strengthening of rural organizations and institutions, local resource control and management, and rural-based training programmes.
A new approach is required in the design and implementation of watershed projects which, rather than fighting against the external conditions referred to above, seeks to incorporate them in the project rationale and to benefit from them. If a crop is profitable it may help farmers to finance improved cultivation practices; if land tenure is an issue then a long-term, written land-use certificate may be a major incentive for farmers to participate; local control over forest land and forest resources may provide a user group, a beekeepers' association for example, with an interest in preventing forest fires.
Participatory watershed planning must go beyond initial consultations with the "target population" after which the project designers go back to the office to write up a detailed project proposal. Participation in planning requires a mechanism for priority rating and decision-making at the local level. People need to be informed about available alternatives and to feel that their concerns are being addressed. Initial planning must be followed by a system of monitoring and evaluation so that the rural people themselves will be able to follow and measure progress made on joint decisions, and make changes if necessary to ensure satisfactory results.
Participatory planning also means tentative or preliminary project designs in order to "get started" on the ground. As noted above, most national and international funding agencies require a fully prepared project document before allocating funds. However, if participatory planning is to be taken seriously, implementation phases will need to be preceded by formulation projects which will provide the necessary funding to permit the involvement of local people or their representatives.
What is required is a new approach whereby more funds will be earmarked for project formulation and a fairly long start-up period, in which the details are worked out in consultation with the watershed population.
A typical project might require the following stages:
· Project identification and conceptualization of basic project idea. This would require some two to three weeks of fieldwork and the preparation of a short document.· Assessment of project idea and, if retained, presentation to interested funding agencies for a general expression of interest. This might take several months.
· Formulation of preliminary project, and general outline of main phase project. Preparation could take four to six weeks and would need to include preparation of a preliminary project document.
· Assessment and, if retained, formal approval and funding of preliminary project. Depending on the funding agency, this operation could take from a few months to a year, or even more.
· Implementation of preliminary project. This would entail identification of rural institutions and their leaders; establishment of a dialogue with local people; rapid rural appraisal; watershed surveys; problem analysis; formulation of immediate objectives, strategies, activities, outputs, inputs, budget, etc.; identification of appropriate national and, if necessary, counterpart international technical experts; identification of needs for institutional changes or arrangements and establishment of monitoring and evaluation system; formulation of a preliminary watershed development plan for the entire watershed or for selected subwatersheds; and preparation of the project document for the main project.
During this period, the implementation of selected pilot efforts - for example, the stabilization of a slope threatening a local school could be particularly effective in motivating interest and support from local people.
Use of advanced planning techniques and tools such as rapid rural appraisal, computer-assisted land-use planning, watershed hydrologic modelling and geographic information systems should be encouraged in order to speed up planning and make it more reliable and flexible. However, the time saved through the use of these tools should be spent on cooperation with the land users, rather than on more detailed top-down land-use planning for them. This project could typically have a duration of six to 18 months.
First phase of main project. This should follow immediately after the preliminary project and might typically have a duration of three to five years.
Second phase of main project. Most watershed management efforts integrating the needs and concerns of local people will require a relatively lengthy implementation period. A second phase of an additional five years is not uncommon.
Participatory monitoring and evaluation
Participatory monitoring and evaluation must be an integral part of participatory watershed management. People who participate, investing time and effort in an activity from which they hope to benefit, will need to be part of a continuing process of investigating how things are going, whether changes are needed, whether expected results are still realistic, whether new alternatives have become available, etc.
Poor people, who may have invested a rather large share of their available time and resources, and thereby exposed themselves to greater risks in case of project failure, will be especially anxious to follow progress. In such cases it is necessary to design a rather sensitive set of indicators that will be able to answer questions raised by the participants, and give early warning when, or hopefully before, things start going wrong.
The need to grow food crops may have a decisive Impact on a watershed
New approaches in extension
It is evident that traditional extension methods, where the role of the extension agent was to bring the "message" of the research station or the ministry to the farmer, must be broadened in order to be effective in the context of participatory watershed management, where the community itself is often the "research station" or the "outdoor laboratory" and where the ministry and its personnel can learn from as well as teach the local people.
The watershed extension worker will have to explore possible solutions with the rural people, help form and support user groups, growers' associations and the like, and initially act as the link with government agencies, research stations, universities, non-governmental organizations, etc. in carrying a "message" in the opposite direction, namely from the community to the support services. Eventually, however, he/she should work him/herself out of the job by showing community representatives how to obtain government services directly.
Incentives
Direct incentives such as food for work or the distribution of free seedlings from government nurseries may have a place in participatory watershed management, but they must be designed to permit the upland people to dedicate time and effort to the start-up of activities which are productive and will eventually, i.e. in less than four to six years, become financially independent of the inputs received during the establishment phase.
Rural organizations are a key element both for participatory planning and for the sustainability and continuity of the project once implementation begins. Without them, no dialogue can take place between government agencies and the watershed population, and bottom-up planning therefore cannot exist.
Government agencies need to identify appropriate rural institutions and formal as well as informal leaders. They should not, however, seek to control or employ such leaders, as this would reduce the latter's authority and their mandate to speak on behalf of the group or community.
There are no established rules or models for rural organizations, and none which will be implicitly best for involvement in watershed management planning and implementation. A group may be formed on the basis of a variety of interests common to its members: religion, trade unions; growers associations (coffee for example); grazing or livestock associations; extended family; common boundaries; women's groups; cooperatives; etc. The important question is not what it is but how well it functions, how well it represents the interests of its members and to what degree its leaders really speak on behalf of all members.
Non-governmental organizations
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) may play a decisive role m providing support to rural organizations in their formation, in the training of community leaders, in the generation of political awareness, and so on. Because they are independent of the government structure, they can be more flexible and directly responsive to the needs of the community, and they may have easier access to minority groups and peoples, areas of national or international conflict, etc.
Some care is needed, however, when NGOs speak or act on behalf of rural people. NGOs have their own objectives for which they are created and supported, and these may or may not coincide with the needs of the upland people. Large national and international NGOs often have an urban view on issues such as nature conservation, deforestation, and water and air pollution, with a quite different priority rating than that of the upland subsistence farmer who is trying to feed his/her family.
As stressed at the beginning of this article, the effective involvement of local people in the planning and implementation of watershed management implies that the traditional top-down system must be changed to one with increased decentralization. This does not mean, however, that national-level organization of watershed management should be disbanded. On the contrary, a convincing argument can be made for the further strengthening and coordination of national agencies and mechanisms. Centralized planning is needed for watersheds of national importance. The decision to protect areas upstream of major hydroelectric dams, city water intakes, major irrigation schemes and flood-prone development areas will have to be made at national level. And for all major efforts, national-level commitment of resources will be essential.
Even in these watersheds of national importance, however, it is unrealistic to plan land use and land-use changes without consulting the land users, be they government agencies, local communities, commercial or subsistence farmers, livestock owners or herders, or fuelwood collectors. It is also unrealistic to expect that land-use changes will happen unless the land user sees a benefit for him/herself and the immediate community/family.
The findings of the Latin American Technical Cooperation Network in Watershed Management confirm that strong national organization of watershed management efforts is essential, and identify a number of elements as basic for effective and sustainable efforts. These elements are all the more relevant for projects and programmes aimed at involving and providing benefits to local people in all regions:
· An interministerial committee. The challenges of upland conservation cut across the responsibilities of many ministries and can be most effectively overseen by a committee designed to promote harmonization of policy issues such as environmental protection, agricultural production, forestry, water supply infrastructure, employment, and human settlement and migration, thereby ensuring that the needs of local people are adequately considered.· A mechanism for inter-agency coordination of ground-level action. The coordination of implementing institutions is essential for appropriate rural development as well as for the optimum sustainable use of natural resources. For example, the construction of rural roads (perhaps under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Public Works) must advance cautiously in watersheds with hydroelectric facilities (under the auspices of the Ministry of Energy). Soil conservation programmes, networks of protected areas, rural schools construction, etc. must be coordinated and, if necessary, modified to ensure effective integrated watershed management.
· A lead agency. For effective planning and implementation of a given watershed management effort, it is necessary to identify and strengthen the responsibility of one of the coordinating agencies. The lead agency will vary from case to case; the key is that it must be fully committed to the resolution of all the challenges facing the watershed, and not solely those with which it is directly charged.
Many countries have made significant progress toward strengthening the essential aspects discussed above, but most, if not all, find that there are still important gaps to be filled before large-scale watershed management programmes based on people's participation move from the realm of theory to reality. The challenge therefore is to analyse these gaps and identify ways in which the incomplete yet valuable experiences of individual countries may be combined in the search for comprehensive solutions to be applied subsequently according to the particular situation in each country.
