OAR@ICRISATRethinking policy and institutional imperatives for integrated watershed management: Lessons and experiences from semi-arid India BShiferawauthorM C SBantilanauthorS PWaniauthorThis study investigates the institutional and policy issues that limit effective participation of resource users in community watershed programs and identifies key lessons for harnessing collective action and its effectiveness in achieving economic and environmental outcomes. It shows that spatial and temporal attributes of watersheds and the associated market failures that accelerate degradation of agricultural and environmental resources require innovative policy and institutional arrangements for coordinating use and management of resources. Under enabling policies, IWM can effectively contribute towards diversification of production into high-value products, reversal of resource degradation, growth in the incomes of the poor and enhance the ability to mitigate the effect of drought. However, the degree of biophysical and social complexity within watershed communities could often undermine incentives for collective action, thwart distribution of benefits against the landless and resource-poor households and even lead to depletion of groundwater resources. Governments and other stakeholders have a unique role to play in kick-starting the process of transformation through strategic natural resource and productivity-enhancing investments that strengthen local capacity for collective action and generate local public goods. Such collective investments could serve as building blocks for private productivity-enhancing and risk-mitigating investments as they boost profitability of productive assets (land and labor) and encourage farmer adoption of beneficial conservation practices. The lessons and experiences also show that integrating interventions along watershed frontiers would require a flexible learning alliance of institutions and cross-disciplinary teams with complementary skills and competencies.Watershed Management2008WFL PublisherArticle

For work being deposited by its own author: In self-archiving this collection of files and associated bibliographic metadata, I grant OAR@ICRISAT the right to store them and to make them permanently available publicly for free on-line. I declare that this material is my own intellectual property and I understand that OAR@ICRISAT does not assume any responsibility if there is any breach of copyright in distributing these files or metadata. (All authors are urged to prominently assert their copyright on the title page of their work.)

For work being deposited by someone other than its author: I hereby declare that the collection of files and associated bibliographic metadata that I am archiving at OAR@ICRISAT) is in the public domain. If this is not the case, I accept full responsibility for any breach of copyright that distributing these files or metadata may entail.

Clicking on the deposit button indicates your agreement to these terms.