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Conference Paper Participatory Irrigation Management in Andhra Pradesh, India: Policy Implementation and Transformation in the Tungabhadra Right Bank Low Level Canal(2000) Mollinga, Peter P.; Doraiswamy, R.; Engbersen, Kim"This paper discusses the implementation of irrigation reform policy in the State of Andhra Pradesh, India. It reports on the impact of the introduction of participatory irrigation management (PIM) in two secondary canals (distributaries) in the Tungabhadra Right Bank Low Level Canal irrigation system. The findings are that the rural elite has captured most of the seats in the water users associations' managing committees, that committee membership is strongly linked to party politics, that a significant amount of physical rehabilitation works have been undertaken resulting in a technically improved canal system, that the reform has had no significant impact on water distribution so far and has not lead to increase in irrigated area (unlike in some other parts of the State), and that the relationship between Irrigation Department and water users is 'in flux' but is yet to qualitatively change. Despite this capturing of the policy by the rural elite, a framework has been created that in principle allows far- reaching reforms. However, special efforts are required to achieve the stated objectives of equitable and democratic irrigation management. It is unlikely that existing government agencies will be able to address these issues effectively."Conference Paper Watershed Management, Self Help Groups, and Inter-Institutional Linkages(2000) Sharma, Kailash C."Generally speaking, watershed management involves harnessing rainfall, improvement measures on barren hill slopes, privately owned lands, commonly owned lands and water recourses in rain fed areas with peoples participation. It begins with two most important resources i.e., water and land. Watershed Management has a strong technological component encompassing conservation of rain water as much as possible at the place where it falls and drainage of excess water safely to storage ponds; avoiding gully formation and putting checks at appropriate intervals to control soil erosion and to recharge ground water; and utilization of land according to its capability. "However, the medium of watershed management is people's participation. Without people's participation, the technological aspects have limited relevance. In the past, the technical details were emphasized and less attention was given to people's participation. "Collective management of resources is a prerequisite for successful watershed management and it requires strong village level institutions. In the absence of strong village level institutions, common resources are exploited. Therefore, institutions, be formal or informal in terms of organizational setup are needed for sustainable watershed management. "As the existing institutions are not performing as expected, the need for evolution of alternative institutions is strongly felt. The process of institution building is essential but is a time taking and difficult task. This is where the role of good non-government organisations (NGOs) becomes crucial for mobilising people for collective action. Initially, confidence and friendship are developed with the local people. Then, they are encouraged to participate in decision making regarding improvement in the watershed. Once a sort of trust is established a somewhat formal institution is built for collective action. "The Khulgad Micro Watershed case of Uttar Pradesh Hills presented in the paper shows that watershed management activities have made significant progress in reversing the land use trends in favour of agro forestry and social forestry in the study villages. It is optimistic to note that it is possible to reverse the land use dynamics in favour of environment if suitable interventions are implemented with peoples participation. An NGO of professionals, the Central Himalayan Environment Association (CHEA) played the role of organising people. The changes in land use have been possible with involvement of people's institutions at village level called Gram Sansdhan Prabandh Samitis (GSPSs) (Village Resource Management Committees) and Mahila Mangal Dals (MMDs) (Women Welfare Groups) in the villages. "The dependency syndrome in participatory mode of development is prevalent almost everywhere wherein people have become conditioned to expecting subsidised inputs from government sponsored programmes of watershed development or any other external agency. Therefore, watershed management activities are carried out as long as there is support from outside either directly or indirectly. Once support from outside is withdrawn, the watershed management activities also come to a halt. This is not sustainable watershed management. For watershed management to become sustainable, the people should own it and should be able to fund it on their own. This can be achieved through the institution of Self Help Groups (SHGs) and their linkage with formal financial institutions such as commercial banks, regional rural banks and cooperative banks. "Self Help Groups are informal groups that are formed around felt need and are used for collective action. In the context of making watershed management self-sustaining, these groups promote savings among members and use their pooled savings to meet their consumption, production and investment credit requirements. The group savings are supplemented by outside fund be in the form of bank loan or grant from NGOs who promote them. However, these groups continue on their own even after the withdrawal of the NGO, thus, providing sustainability to watershed management activities. The experiences of Mysore Rehabilitation and Development Agency (MYRADA) in Karnataka and Aga Khan Rural Support Programme, India (AKRSP (I) in Gujarat amply demonstrate the power of SHGs in this regard. "For watershed management activities to be carried out on a sustainable basis, it is important to consider the inter-institutional linkages amongst the institutions that need to interact frequently. Basically, two sets of institutions are involved internal and external. For the internal or village level institutions, it is important to form federations and have linkage with panchayats. For external institutions i.e., government departments, NGOs and donors, it is important to work together for synergy and to give top priority to capacity building and financial sustainability of village level institutions right from the beginning."Conference Paper The Sundarbans: A Riparian Commons in Search of Management(2000) Mitra, Manoshi"With an area of 100,000 sq. ha., and covered mostly by water, the region known as the Sundarbans provides livelihood for millions of people who collect fish, crustaceans and minor forest produce. It is also home to many endangered species of animals, birds, plants and reptiles. The stress and exploitation to which the area is subjected raises concern about its long-term survival. "The paper examines issues related to the current status of the Sundarbans. The evolution of the management will be understood as a set of riparian commons constituted by local communities over time, and the role of the state in laying down the institutional framework within which such commons are managed. The land administration and land revenue policies of the colonial state are addressed, including the impact of the 1793 Permanent Settlement Act. The emphasis on land reclamation by the zamindars, as the basis for increasing land rents and revenues, laid the rationale for state policy well into the 19th century. "In pre-colonial times the areas surrounding the Sundarbans were hardly inhabited. The local zamindars gave rights of collection of minor forest produce to collectors in return for a fee. The process of induced habitation of the surrounding areas started in a major way in the late 18th century. In 1875-76 the remaining area was declared a reserve forest, and this has since formed the basis for its management. The colonial state recognized the rights of the surrounding communities to collect produce in return for a fee. These rights were never coded and have been handed down from generation to generation. The pressure on the commons is increasing because marginalized groups from elsewhere settle on its borders in the hope of gaining livelihoods. The pressure is further intensified by commercial interests that control the labor and livelihoods of the resource users. The current situation is analyzed using a tragedy of the commons framework. "Recent attempts to organize the resource users to enable articulation of their rights and roles in responsible management of the commons, along with the state, will be described. NGOs and environmental groups are involved in these efforts, based on the perceived need to constitute the commons afresh by excluding certain groups and enforcing norms and rules of management. International agencies are attempting to follow this trend by stressing the need for participatory management, organization of resource users and their roles in the development and enforcement of rules for the use of the commons. These efforts will be analyzed with a view to understanding potential trends in the management of this vast resource."Conference Paper The Performance of Exclusive Economic Zones (PEEZ)(2000) Andreeva, Elena; Hoel, Alf Hakon; Reichelt, Russell"The acknowledgment and formal establishment of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), largely during the 1970s and 1980s, brought more than a third of the world's oceans under the jurisdiction of coastal states, thus introducing one of the most far-reaching institutional changes in international society of the twentieth century. Today, more than one hundred EEZs are in force, covering virtually all continental shelf resources and most of the world's fisheries. "The Scientific Steering Committee of the international project on the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC) has decided to launch a program of studies dealing with the consequences of this institutional change through the Performance of Exclusive Economic Zones (PEEZ) framework outlined in this scoping report. The objective of PEEZ is to contribute to our understanding of the roles that institutions play in global environmental change and, more specifically, to address IDGEC's focus on the reasons why some institutional responses to environmental problems prove more effective than others (IDGEC 1999). Through a systematic investigation of the performance of the EEZs in terms of sustainability, efficiency, governance, and knowledge, PEEZ aims to enhance our understanding of the ways institutions work in practice, a matter of substantial interest to the policy community as well as the science community. "PEEZ does not seek to assess all the consequences associated with the creation of EEZs. Rather, it highlights the performance of EEZs with regard to living marine resources, and grants priority to IDGEC's core regions: the Circumpolar North and Southeast Asia. The purpose of this scoping report is to spell out a set of key science questions regarding the performance of EEZs and to identify analytic procedures and data sets as well as organizational matters relevant to this research program."Conference Paper Governing Local Commons: What Can be Learned from the Failures of Lake Ahemes Institutions in Benin?(2000) Dangbegnon, Constant"At different parts of the world, local commons are moving into more and more complex situations due to changing ecological, socioeconomic and cultural conditions of their exploitation. Therefore, successful institutions for governing them have emerged as a crucial issue of sustainability. Institution is defined as rules, eligibility criteria, decision-making arrangements, punishment structures, and action assignments. Sustainable commons are strongly related to the capacity of the stakeholders to design and share institutions that are enforced and continuously adapted in face of evolving conditions. The paper focuses on the specific case of the evolution of Lake Ahemes institutions: since the pre-colonial times (before 1894), through colonial (1894-1960) and after independence (1960-1990) periods, and to the recent democratization era (after 1990) in Benin. Lake Aheme is located in the southern area of Benin. With a length of 24 km, the lake's surface is 78 square km during low level of water and 100 square km at the periods of inundation of its floodplains. Forty villages are surrounding the lake. The Pedah (fishers) and the Ayizo (fisher-farmers) are the dominant ethnic groups around the lake, among many smaller other ethnic groups. Lake Aheme is a complex local common, which is continuously changing under the influence of several factors (ecological, socioeconomic, technological, cultural, and political) that have influenced its institutions since colonial times. Despite repetitive failures of Lake Aheme's institutions, this case study helps gain a deep understanding into the relevance of institutions for governing local commons such as Lake Aheme. The paper analyzes the evolution of the institutions of Lake Aheme's institutions in relation to factors that influence the failures, from an historical perspective. Can successful institutions be designed to regulate use and access to local commons? In addition, beyond the insights gained into the ongoing struggles, conflicts, negotiation, mediation and adaptations of stakeholders, major learning points are identified to discuss the extent to which institutions can be better designed for governing local commons in the future."Conference Paper Water Management Decentralization in the Red River Delta, Vietnam: An Uncompleted Transition Process Toward Local Governance(2000) Fontenelle, Jean-Philippe"The political evolution of the 1980s, which led to a liberalization of the economy and to State withdrawal from agricultural production, was the framework of important changes in hydraulic systems of the Red River delta in Vietnam. A vast number of small local systems was created. These systems found a place among the grid formerly defined by hydraulic schemes of big size, centrally managed by specialized State organizations, Irrigation and Drainage Management Companies (IDMC). "Small systems were created by communal co-operatives in response to water-users local demand, who were dissatisfied with respect to centralized systems water supply. Actually, these small systems play today an essential part in irrigation, even in drainage of Red River delta paddy fields. Yet, State agencies do not take them into account in their characterization of delta hydraulics formal framework. "The national reform of communal co-operatives launched in 1996, consolidates the function of old local collectivist organizations in supervising farming households, in their granting the ability of becoming commercial institutions of service bound for users. The services concerned are initially water supply, but also electricity supply and in few cases farm equipment. "Vietnamese State recognizes with the co-operatives a legitimacy of representation of the farming households toward hydraulic management, via its support to a strict organization of resources management, while refusing to integrate the existence of small local hydraulic systems. Actually, they were created by co-operatives, but according to a reverse dynamics, initiated by users' local demand. "It results from this an important shift between formal and informal framework. Negotiations between co- operatives and IDMCs, such as the financial resource sharing, are managed in terms of a power struggle, apart from any transparency. This transition period is leading to a great diversity of situations. At the same time new local innovative management solutions emerge, but misuses of power due to water-users' exclusion from the formal arena of negotiation also arise."Conference Paper Water Disputes in the Educadorian Context Up to the Third Millennium: No State, No Market, No Common Property The transition of Santa Rosa (Tungurahua province)(2000) Ruf, Thierry"In the Ecuadorian part of the Andes, irrigation is used on some 400,000 hectares; of which 320, 000 depend on private or community-based water management. State schemes, thus, only serve 80,000 hectares. In the 1970s-1980s, the state started taking over water administration by nationalizing all the water resources and granting concessions to the communities. In the beginning, the Instituto ecuatoriano de los recursos hidraulicos did useful work by modernizing the water rights system, but because of inter-community conflicts, local concessions were split up and community organizations became divisive. "After thirty years of 'hydraulic bureaucracy,' the last few governments have been trying to apply a new, liberal policy. During the last five years, the World Bank has been introducing a new legal framework, much like the Chilean model for water privatization. Resistance has come from many quarters. The politico-economic crisis during the last ten years has not facilitated the introduction and adoption of the new water law. The problem of water is now the focus of farmer organizations and the civil society, as well as professional circle, of course. "Since 1988 we have been studying a very complex slope of the Andes in the Santa Rosa region. This paper describes the problems facing the local society because it lacks the background needed for water management and conflict resolution. The communities of the region are divided, their state authority is weak, and they are unfamiliar with the new legal provisions needed for water management. Our example comes from the fight over water from an old canal between 1990 and1995 period when the State decided to allocate all the water to the communities residing along the canal. Today, the water dispute has taken a new, curious turn: the people are faced with no state, no market and no common links."Conference Paper International Lending Agencies and Regional Environmental Cooperation in the Black and Caspian Seas(2000) Matthews, Mary M."How do international lending agencies influence domestic policy makers decisions to join international regional environmental regimes? Why does a regime form in one region and not in another similar region when there is a clear need for cooperation in each case? This paper seeks to address these questions specific to the Black and Caspian Sea regions. Both Seas suffer from nearly catastrophic environmental degradation, both are mostly surrounded by former Soviet Bloc states, and all states involved are struggling under challenging economic conditions. Yet the Caspian Sea Region has no regime of cooperation to care for the environment, while the Black Sea Region has implemented an environmental regime charged with overseeing and improving the ecological conditions of the shared sea. "Employing empirical data, it is hypothesized that domestic policy-makers choose to join regional regimes to protect the environment of a commonly held sea only when it is clearly within their economic interests. Conversely, when there are alternative sources for domestic economic gain that may be hampered by joining such regimes, cooperation among states becomes less appealing to the domestic policymakers. When domestic policymakers do not see clear incentives for environmental cooperation, such regimes are unlikely to form. Hence the role of international lending agencies to induce cooperation among states is often perceived by policy makers in terms of economic payoffs for cooperation, versus cooperation leading to the potential decrease of income from other sources. When there are not other sources of income that are adversely affected by cooperation though, international lending agencies are more able to induce cooperative behavior, especially if there are clear economic incentives tied to this behavior. This paper will tests these assumptions to determine how cooperative regimes emerge in areas of profound environmental degradation, and how much impact international lending agencies actually have on the formation of these regimes by inducing cooperation."Conference Paper Developing Small Dams and Social Capital in Yemen: Local Responses to External Assistance(2000) Vermillion, Douglas L."This paper examines six cases of small dam development along small seasonal rivers (wadi) in the rugged mountainous province of Al-Mahweet in north central Yemen. Development of small dams is a current priority of the Government of Yemen and various foreign donors. The government's objectives for small dam development are to recharge groundwater aquifers, create new irrigated area and provide sources of water for domestic uses. "The paper examines how external assistance effects local social responses of whether to invest, as groups, in further dam development, to construct water delivery systems and create rules for management. Most external assistance strategies are designed and managed in ways which discourage development of local 'social capital' for dam development--even in cases where local people desire to develop small dams. Social capital tends to develop in cases where assistance is modest, dependent on matching local investment, or is unavailable. "The cases show that where the share of farmer investment in a dam project is dominant (such as in Al-Mamar and Saheb) the cost per ha and even cost per m3 of water storage created is significantly lower compared with projects dominated by government assistance. The cases suggest that external assistance produces high-cost projects and discourage local investment. The cases with high proportions of external assistance also have poorly developed rules for investment, water rights and O&M. "The author recommends that assistance strategies be reoriented to place highest priority on facilitating development of local institutions and social capital. External technical assistance should be designed to facilitate local initiatives and financial assistance should be provided to stimulate, not supplant, local investment capacity."Conference Paper Connecting with the Grassroots: The Millers River Watershed Council and the Massachusetts Watershed Initiative(2000) Showers, Kate"This paper will chart the experience of the Millers River Watershed Council with a Commonwealth of Massachusetts (USA)'s Capacity Building Grant. The discussion will assess the significance of personalities, ideologies, institutional structures and understandings of 'community-based' and 'citizen-based' organizations when connecting grassroots organizations to state initiatives to protect a watershed. "In 1970 a postmaster, a farmer, an auto mechanic and a small businessman founded the Millers River Watershed Council to fight the dumping of raw sewage and industrial waste into the Millers River. The Council grew in size and effectiveness; today the river is significantly cleaner. "The Council was not unique. By the mid-1980s watershed groups existed on all major Massachusetts streams. The groups experienced difficulties relating to state agencies' disunity; divided into sectors, departments were unable to relate to each other or address watershed problems. In response, river activists formed the Massachusetts Watershed Coalition in 1992. The Coalition approached the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs (EOEA) with a proposal to restore Massachusetts' rivers to fishable and swimmable quality and protect their function by developing public/private partnerships on a watershed basis. "Dialogue between the Coalition and EOEA resulted in the Massachusetts Watershed Initiative, whose purpose was to 'shift from top-down, federal-and state-driven environmental management to bottom-up, locally focused environmental management.' A main component of the Initiative is EOEA's reorientation of environmental agencies to serve watershed-based decision-making. "Implementation of a pilot project in 1994 resulted in the Watershed Management Methodology. Considered essential were: * co-leadership roles of state, watershed associations or other citizen groups, business community and municipalities to implement the watershed approach; * bottom-up resource assessment, planning and involvement of all interests; * sub-watershed focus of problem identification and Watershed Action Plan development; * goal of targeted allocation of limited dollars to watershed priorities, according to where the most environmental protection for available funds can be achieved. "This Watershed Management Methodology also calls for strengthening the institutional capacity of the existing watershed councils. For, along with river advocacy, the councils are expected to assume bureaucractic responsibilities, relating to and co-ordinating with activities of state and federal agencies. This linking up of agencies is supposed to ensure popular participation in the design and implementation of a Five-Year Phase Planning Cycle. "The statewide implementation of the Massachusetts Watershed Initiative began in 1977. At that time, the Millers River Watershed Council was quite weak; membership was low, and those most active were tired. When approached by a representative of the state, a capacity building grant appeared to some to be a useful idea. Application for and implementation of this grant precipitated dialogue about the purpose, direction and future of the group, and whether the state's agenda reflected the Council's interests. This paper will discuss and evaluate the on- going process."