Browsing by Author "Kerr, John"
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Working Paper Evaluating Watershed Management Projects(2001) Kerr, John; Chung, Kimberley"Watershed projects play an increasingly important role in managing soil and water resources throughout the world. Research is needed to ensure that new projects draw upon lessons from their predecessors? experiences. However, the technical and social complexities of watershed projects make evaluation difficult. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods, which traditionally have been used separately, both have strengths and weaknesses. Combining them can make evaluation more effective, particularly when constraints to study design exist. This paper presents mixed-methods approaches for evaluating watershed projects. A recent evaluation in India provides illustrations."Conference Paper From Regulation to Facilitation? The Forest Department and Joint Forest Management in Tamilnadu, India(2002) Jagannadha, Rao; Kerr, John"Deforestation, leading to the loss of India's valuable natural resources and consequent deprivation of livelihood of millions of people, has been a major national and international concern. While this drastic deterioration in recent years exposed the limitations of government management, participatory management strategies that foster partnerships between government agencies and local communities are now regarded as vital not only to arrest this degradation but also to promote forest regeneration. India's joint forest management (JFM) program provides a remarkable example of this kind of institutional innovation and represents a major effort over the last few years to make this policy work for both forests and people (Saxena 1999). "...This paper presents some key issues and challenges facing the Forest Department bureaucracy in the implementation of JFM in Tamil Nadu, India. A detailed qualitative investigation conducted by a Forest Deparment insider provides the basis for preliminary conclusions about officials attitudes toward JFM and perceptions of its prospects."Conference Paper Property Rights and Environmental Services in Lampung Province, Indonesia(2006) Kerr, John; Pender, John; Suyanto, S."The impacts of this program on the sustainability of forest use and on poverty in Indonesia are not yet known. Tribudi Syukur's experience suggests that providing such rewards in exchange for environmental services is a promising approach, but it raises several issues worthy of investigation. How do people become aware of and gain access to such a program? Are only 'well connected' villages with knowledgeable leaders able to take advantage? How do community members organize themselves to apply and achieve the management objectives of the program? Do they build upon prior successes in organizing collective action within the community? Who gains and who loses from these activities? Do such programs actually provide sustainable environmental benefits, and what impacts do they have on poverty? This paper presents initial findings from a survey of communities, HKm groups and households in Sumberjaya, focusing on the process of establishing HKm groups along with some indicators of expected program impacts."Conference Paper Selling Environmental Services: Challenges and Opportunities for Sustaining Local Resource Management: Lessons from Joint Forest Management Experience in Tamil Nadu, India(2004) Matta, Jagannadha Rao; Kerr, John"Community based forest resource management institutions, commonly known as Village Forest Committees (VFCs), are increasingly being established under Government of India's Joint Forest Management (JFM) policy all over the country to help restore the nation's degraded forests. The VFCs, besides having a direct and active role in protection and management of these forests, are entitled to various timber and other forest products for their services rendered in restoring these areas. While some VFCs are functioning well in certain situations, in a majority of places, they do not last long. This poor sustainability situation of the VFCs is threatening the whole concept of JFM that paved the way for the emergence (resurgence) of community-based forest resource governance in a revolutionary manner. A major reason for such a decline is lack of enough incentives for local people for them to be really enthusiastic about forest management. This is particularly so when JFM is introduced in highly degraded forests that offer no immediate tangible forest benefits to the local people involved. Unfortunately, the current JFM strategy is primarily built on the notion that local communities can manage forests if their costs involved in undertaking this task are compensated with resultant forest produce such as fuel, fodder, timber, and NTFP. Accordingly, most state statutes on JFM elaborately talk of sharing arrangements for these benefits. There is however, hardly ever any discussion on compensating the forest fringe communities for the environmental services rendered by them through improved forest protection and ecological restoration entailed in JFM. The need for such a pay off becomes particularly significant when these communities are helping restore highly degraded forests but receive no perceivable benefit under the current JFM policies that closely tied the incentives available in JFM just to forest produce. Strongly attesting the above observation, an empirical study of a JFM program in Tamil Nadu, India, not only highlights the significance of the environmental service benefit aspect of this forest restoration, but also shows some potential for making the functioning of VFCs financially viable, availing this service. It is endeavored to give an overview of these opportunities and circumstances in this paper, based on an in depth analysis of the efforts of Forest Department and villagers involved in selling the message of enhanced water supplies made available through JFM in order to ensure the sustainability of these local resource governance systems."Conference Paper Tenure and Access Rights as Constraints to Community Watershed Development in Orissa, India(2004) Kumar, Kundan; Kerr, John; Choudhury, PranabFrom introduction: "This paper examines the performance of watershed projects in hilly areas of Orissa, India, characterized by conflicts over land rights primarily between the Forest Department and local tribal communities. The study area is notable for the governments attempted use of mechanisms to reward land users in upper watersheds for adopting perennial vegetation that would provide various environmental services; this approach is virtually unknown in the rest of India. However, the approach has met limited success due to conflicts surrounding the status of Forest Department land and failure to appreciate existing systems of customary land tenure. The paper demonstrates the perverse outcomes that result when project interventions fail to appreciate these issues and discusses some approaches to resolve the problem."Conference Paper The Watershed Commons: Lessons Learned(2006) Kerr, John"Watershed development is an important component of rural development and natural resource management strategies in many countries. This paper introduces numerous challenges to successful watershed management, traces how projects have tried to overcome them, and discusses lessons from research on common property. Key challenges include uneven distribution of benefits and costs of technical interventions, multiple and conflicting uses of natural resources within watersheds, multiple and overlapping property rights regimes in watersheds, and the difficulty of encouraging social groups to organize around a spatial unit defined by hydrology. To address these challenges, watershed development approaches have evolved from more technocratic to a greater focus on social organization. However, it is not clear how easily the latter can be replicated widely. In addition, participatory approaches have worked better at a small scale, but hydrological relationships cover a larger scale and some projects have faced tradeoffs in choosing between the two. Optimal approaches for future watershed development are not clear, and theories arising from common property research do not support the idea that it can succeed everywhere. The best approach may be to pursue watershed development where conditions are favorable and work on other things elsewhere, including expanding organizational capacity for watershed management."Journal Article Watershed Management: Lessons from Common Property Theory(2007) Kerr, John"Watershed development is an important component of rural development and natural resource management strategies in many countries. A watershed is a special kind of common pool resource: an area defined by hydrological linkages where optimal management requires coordinated use of natural resources by all users. Management is difficult because watershed systems have multiple, conflicting uses, so any given approach will spread benefits and costs unevenly among users. Theories from commons research predict great difficulty in managing complex watersheds and explain why success has been limited to isolated, actively facilitated microwatershed projects with a focus on social organization. Encouraging collective action is easiest at the microwatershed level but optimal hydrological management requires working at the macrowatershed level. Research suggests potentially severe tradeoffs between these two approaches. Resolving the tradeoffs is necessary for widespread success in watershed development but solutions are not clear. Examples from India illustrate the argument."