Watershed project performance in India: Conservation, productivity, and equity

This article presents an examination of the performance of watershed projects in India's Maharashtra state. It focuses on the challenge of jointly achieving conservation, productivity, and equity in the face of potential trade-offs among these objectives. Watershed projects in the 1990s took a wide variety of approaches ranging from, on one extreme, a highly technocratic focus on technology transfer to, on the other, a participatory approach that emphasized organizing people to share costs and benefits (Farrington et al.). The guiding hypothesis is that socioeconomic rather than technical factors are the limiting constraints to watershed development, so the participatory projects are expected to perform better. Econometric analysis relates various indicators of watershed performance to project interventions and village-level socioeconomic and agroclimatic characteristics. The findings are then related to descriptive and qualitative data regarding the distribution of projects' net benefits and efforts to develop institutional arrangements to share them.