The Watershed Commons: Lessons Learned

Abstract

"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."