Journal of Global Resources

Volume 2January 2016
Page 177-181
ISSN: 2395-3160 (Print), 2455-2445 (Online)

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WATERSHED MANAGEMENT: EXAMPLES AND LESSONS FROM COMMON PROPERTYTHEORY
Veena Dwivedi
Assistant Professor, JRN Rajasthan Vidyapeeth University, Udaipur (Raj.), India
Email: veenaussw@gmail.com
Abstract: 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 watershedsystems have multiple, conflicting uses. Theories from commons research predict great difficulty inmanaging complex watersheds and explain why success has been limited to isolated, actively
facilitated micro watershed projects with a focus on social organization. Encouraging collectiveaction is easiest at the micro watershed level but optimal hydrological management requires
working at the macro watershed level. This paper will give ideas of Watershed management in
Developed country and India with the support of peoples. This paper also introduces criticalchallenges to making watershed development, Work and presents lessons from research onwatersheds and theories about managing the commons.
Keywords: Watershed Management, Common Property, Socioeconomic Challenges
Introduction
A watershed or catchment is an area that drains to a common point, and watershed development
seeks to manage hydrological relationships to optimize the use of natural resources forconservation, productivity, and poverty alleviation. Achieving this requires the coordinatedmanagement of multiple resources within a watershed, including forests, pastures, agriculturalland, surface water and groundwater, all linked through hydrology. Watershed development is an
important component of many countries’ rural development and natural resource management
strategies. The World Bank, for example, invested $1.73 billion in watershed development
from1990-2004 (World Bank 2007), and the Government of India spent over $6 billion from 19962004 (World Resources Institute 2005). Commons theories do not predict that watershedmanagement can be widely successful, and they explain why most projects operate at as village
micro watershed scale. The successful collective action versus a large, macro watershed scalethat is more suitable from a hydrological perspective and it suggests some lessons for policy andpractice. The empirical focus is mainly on India but findings are more broadly applicable. Manywatershed resources are characterized by high exclusion costs and subtract ability, the two main
attributes of common pool resources. Many natural resources in a watershed are often held incommon, such as pastures, forests, ponds, and groundwater. Other resources tend to be managed
individually, especially agricultural land, but also some patches of pasture, forest, and captured
runoff water etc.
Benefits of Watershed Project
Water harvesting involves building small dams to capture runoff from upper watersheds after heavy
rains. Reducing erosion reduces silt in runoff water and in water harvesting ponds, thus
lengthening their lifespan. Water harvesting in turn benefits farms further down the slope by
providing irrigation, either via surface water or by recharging groundwater. These interventions canbe designed to eventually raise the productivity of all natural resources in the watershed. Soilbecomes more productive for agriculture, water is captured for irrigation, and pastures and forests
yield more biomass. All livelihood activities that depend on these resources may be enhanced, and177

employment may increase as agriculture becomes more productive and additional labor is needed
for harvesting and other operations. One important point is that improvements in different natural
resources have different durations.
SUCCESSFUL WATERSHED DEVELOPMENT
Socioeconomic Challenges
Various challenges make watershed management more complicated statistics from successfulprojects. Many success stories, for example, are found in hilly, bowl-shaped micro watersheds withvery favorable conditions for water harvesting. In more typical cases, benefits are incremental andgradual. With a less visible connection between investments made and benefits realized,organizational challenges become more apparent (Kerr 2002). One of the biggest challenges towatershed management is that its costs and benefits are distributed unevenly, yet cooperation isrequired to make it work. Uneven impacts result from spatial variation and multiple, conflicting usesof natural resources. Even in higher rainfall areas of India vegetative regeneration takes about
three years too long to ask poor people to refrain from using resources they need. Accordingly,
watershed projects need to create mechanisms to encourage natural resource utilization consistent
with the common good. This is a simpler task in village-level micro watersheds with discernablehydrological linkages and established social relationships than in macro watersheds spanning
multiple villages.
Technical Challenges
In India, recent hydrological research suggests that watershed projects may be exacerbating
precisely the water shortages they aim to overcome. At the macro watershed level (covering manyvillages), Batchelor et al. (2003) document cases where water harvesting in upper watersheds
reduced water availability downstream. Calder et al. (2006) refers to this as ‘catchment closure,’
whereby water harvesting upstream concentrates groundwater locally and then intensive pumping
exhausts the shallow aquifer. In this case watershed development prevents both surface runoff andgroundwater from moving naturally downstream. It suggests two perverse project outcomes: first,
what is good for one micro watershed can be bad for others downstream, and second, what isgood for a watershed in the short term can be bad in the long term. Recent literature presents
additional cases detailing inaccurate understanding of technical relationships in watersheds. Allover India and elsewhere, Trees are planted in watershed projects with the stated objective ofpromoting Groundwater recharge. A motto of the Tamil Nadu Forest Department is ‘Save Trees toSave Water.’ Some farmers actually benefit from soil erosion through silt deposition on their landand even actively encourage erosion to move soil to where it can be most productive. Rhoades(1999) raised this question regarding participatory watershed approaches and discussed many of
the challenges. He suggested the need for more empirical analysis of whether participatory
approaches can really be replicated widely, and he argued that project workers need betterscience, better methods, and better organizational skills along with donor money and patience. The
absence of measures to manage groundwater demand contributes to this problem in India.
Electricity to run pumps is free in some states and subject to a low, flat fee in others, allowing pumpowners to draw unlimited water without affecting their costs. In addition, whoever pumps water firstowns it (Singh 1992) and this encourages over pumping. Sheds. Most evaluations still cover thesmall success stories and it remains unclear whether watershed management can succeed beyonda few small exceptions.
Successful Management of the Commons
There are so many literatures on conditions that encourage successful commons management.
Wade (1988) and Ostrom (1990) offered sets of favorable conditions, and Baland and Platteau(1996) updated them. Agrawal (2001) synthesized and revised these factors, focusing on thosethat enable sustainable governance of the commons. For watershed projects, the key issue is agroup’s ability to establish new governance system to effectively manage the watershed commons.
It draws on Agrawal’s (2001) synthesis but includes only those factors likely to be important forestablishing a new, successful management system. Many factors in Agrawal’s synthesis draw

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from Wade (1988), and Baland and Platteau (1996). Watershed characteristics correspond poorly
to the list of enabling conditions. This provides many clues about why watersheds are difficult tomanage and why projects might work better in a village-based micro watershed than a much larger
area. Eight favorable buttes are listed: small size, well-defined boundaries, low mobility, possible
storage of benefits, predictability, feasibility of improving the resource, traceability of benefits to amanagement intervention, and availability of indicators of the resource condition. Almost all ofthese attribute present problems because they rarely characterize watershed management.
Platforms for Managing the Commons‘Platforms’ for analysis and negotiation have been discussed in the literature as a means topromote collective action on the commons. Steins and Edwards (1999a, 1999b) drew on this idea
in an effort to move away from theoretical discussions about people’s propensity to workcollectively and toward discussions of approaches to help them do so. They concluded that
platforms have great potential to improve commons management, listing several factors that help
them work. Very few watershed programs in India operate this way
Factors associated with Effectiveness Common Pool Resources
1. It is important that nested platforms correspond with the resource system level that is atstake in ecological, economic, and social terms and that they are stakeholder-based, rather
than user-based.
2. The empowerment of platform participants to elicit their views is important to challenge
inequalities (in terms of gender, ethnicity, education, and skills) and dominant power
relations, and to create a situation in which communication is as open (and voluntary) as
possible.
3. Stakeholders’ priorities, as well as the resource system, are dynamic and are constantly
being reshaped.
4. Platforms for resource use negotiation are always nested within other decision-makingstructures.
5. There is good reason to believe that the presence of a third party is beneficial to theperformance of nested platforms.
Evaluations of Indian Watershed Projects
There have been a number of evaluations of Indian watershed projects over the years but very few
compared different approaches or tried to correct for selection bias. Among the individual
evaluations there appears to be an over representation of well-known, highly supervised projects
known to be successful. This was the case for a special edition of the Indian Journal of Agricultural
Economics (1991) and a set of self-evaluations of participatory projects reported in Hinchcliffe et al.
(1999), for example. Over representation of successful cases often stems from implementing
agencies aiming to promote their work and data sets being more available for heavily supervised
projects with large budgets. Joshi et al. (2005) conducted a Meta analysis of 311 evaluations that
estimated benefit-cost ratios of watershed projects, based on all available studies. Presumably thesuccess stories are also overrepresented in this work. Kerr et al. (2002) randomly selected 86villages in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh to compare the performance of first-generation
government watershed projects with a technical orientation, NGO projects focusing on socialorganization, and the two NGO-government collaborative projects. Bachelor et al. (2003) found thatsuccessful water harvesting in upper watersheds came at the expense of lower watershed areas
due to catchment closure after heavy pumping in upper watersheds. Most evaluations arefavorable. The successes by the projects with an NGO component came in the form of reduced soilerosion, higher crop income, improved management of common pastures, more employment, andincreased irrigation. The authors cautioned that the successful cases were consistently in small
micro watersheds and did not operate widely, with any evidence they could replicate substantiallyor operate in higher scale watersheds.

179Lesson Learn
Indian watershed projects evolved from the mid-1980s to the present by gradually intensifying theirfocus on participation and social organization while also reducing their size. These shifts resulted
mainly from the demonstration effects of early NGO projects but in some cases with influence fromthe literature on community- based natural resource management. In many respects the changes
from large to small and from technocratic to participatory reflect the factors believed to facilitate theemergence of local institutions to manage the commons. It is more likely that the experience of the
Indian watershed projects helps to validate those factors, and less likely that the literature guided
the Indian projects, with perhaps some iteration between the two. The NGOs likely identified theadvantages of a participatory approach simply through their experiences on the ground. Based on
previous experience and literature on collective action, the CIAT team chose to work with small
groups of 30-40 families covering about 200 ha sub watersheds to address natural resource
management problems. Through a long process, the sub watershed groups gradually developed
platforms for diverse stakeholders to jointly analyze and negotiate diverse interests and develop
action plans to manage natural resources. CIAT acted as facilitator (Ransburg and Guerrero 1999).
However, such an approach is incompatible with the strategy made successful by the IGWDP ofinvesting exclusively in separate micro watersheds where water harvesting potential is high andcommunities have demonstrated the ability to work collectively.
Implications for Policy and Practice
The best watershed management approach certainly depends upon the situation and objectives.
Some possibilities are; a.) stay small and give up on complex, higher scale watershedmanagement; b) build capacity for higher scale watershed management through improved
institutional arrangements and improved technologies. Theory and experience have shown thatcollective action is more likely in small, village-level watersheds, and that project agencies can best
facilitate watershed management if they work in a small number of locations. The IGWDP follows
these principles, working only where it perceives a high probability of success. First, being bypassed by a project that would not work is no great loss, and second, rural areas of developing
countries have many other needs besides watershed development. For example, survey
respondents in India expressed strong preference for investments in medical facilities, roads,
latrines and other infrastructure as opposed to watershed development (Kerr et al. 2002). In an eraof decentralization, people should be able to choose between watershed and other investments
like infrastructure and government services.
Research has shown that the micro watershed approach may be creating hydrologicalproblems that would be best addressed by operating at a macro watershed scale. This would
require working simultaneously to promote watershed governance capacity both within andbetween micro watersheds.
Within micro watersheds, this calls for continuing to build
organizational, administrative, and governance skills at local levels as mentioned above. Suchcapacity is needed to bring together stakeholders with conflicting interests, design workable
compromises, and put them to work. Better governance may help in enforcing whateveragreements can be developed. At the macro watershed scale, new institutional arrangements areneeded to promote interaction among micro watershed groups within large macro watersheds, thiswould involve developing something like a ‘nested platforms’ approach at a macro watershedscale. It could involve specific mechanisms to facilitate the interaction such as new legislation or
new arrangements for sharing upstream-downstream costs and benefits. Macro watershedmanagement could also benefit from improved technology to understand and track upstreamdownstream relationships. Technologies that could track hydrological relationships and trace
impacts of natural resource use in one location on another would open new possibilities fordeveloping indicators and monitoring systems to facilitate management.
Conclusion
Commons research emerged in the 1980s in response to the incorrect presumption that thetragedy of the commons was inevitable. Commons researchers do not imagine that all commons

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can be well-managed, yet watershed projects are organized as if this were so, with most watershed
agencies aiming to spread their projects as widely as possible despite unfavorable conditions forcollective action. It is as useful for commons research to point out the limits of common property
resource management as to highlight its potential.
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