"Natural resource management" is an excellent rallying cry, but it has little meaning unless the question is asked: "management for what?" Conservation of the status quo is clearly not the answer. Within the CGIAR the only purpose must be management for higher productivity, to meet the demands of an increasing and hopefully better fed population. Within this, equity must be improved by an appropriate share of the benefits going to the poorest farmers and their families. Finally, this must be done whilst preventing or decreasing damage to the resources, so that preservation of resources is linked directly to their use. However, this is not sufficient now that we understand how far the effects and impacts of this use may spread: to neighbours in diseases and weeds, downstream in silting and pollution, to the globe in greenhouse gases and biodiversity effects. If all these levels of damage can be kept within acceptable limits, then we have some of the key conditions for sustainable use, which is the objective of natural resource management.
This interdependence of enhanced productivity and better management of resources means that there is very little "natural resource management research" per se, because the great majority of the CGIAR projects dealing with soils and water will have both aims, though some will focus most on productivity and others on resource management. In this paper we set out the various types of research that we believe are necessary for the CGIAR System to deal effectively with these interwoven thrusts, though the paper focuses on soil and water resource management in the first instance. The most innovative proposal is that the CGIAR should develop a small number of watershed experiments, dedicated to showing how productivity can be increased in what can be proven to be a sustainable way, in addition to the large body of research in Ecoregional Programmes and elsewhere that must now focus more clearly on these issues. CGIAR Centres, as part of their movement away from their earlier focus on commodity research, can truly embrace an agroecosystem perspective, and should be able to contribute importantly in this conceptual and theoretical realm.
