Watershed Management to Counter Farming Systems Decline Toward a Demand-Driven, Systems-Oriented Research Agenda

Most formal research in support of agricultural development has focused on the alleviation of farm-level productivity constraints, with problem diagnosis often occurring through a single disciplinary lens. There is a strong push within national and international arenas to move toward broader units of analysis and intervention, including the landscape, catchment and watershed. However, there is a current imbalance in the strong momentum behind this shift and the paucity of methodological guidelines for operationalizing these new approaches within research and development (R&D) circles. This paper outlines an approach for grounding watershed management in local incentives for improved natural resource management (NRM) beyond the farm level, addressing component-specific contributions to landscape degradation, and bringing formal research contributions to bear on a demand-driven NRM agenda. Following a description of a methodology used to diagnose problems at landscape or watershed level, a case study from the highlands of central Ethiopia is presented to illustrate the application of the approach within agroforestry. The case study provides a concrete example of how to move from participatory problem diagnosis to a modified research and development agenda at the landscape level. Research Findings • Problem diagnosis for watershed research and development requires an understanding of both the different types of landscape-level NRM problems and how these are prioritized by different actors at the local level. • An integrated research agenda at watershed level must begin with an understanding of the linkages between components (crops, water, livestock, trees, soil) and user groups, and consider the contributions that can be made by specific disciplines to the system at large. • An integrated, demand-driven natural resource management agenda requires that agricultural researchers move beyond the conventional emphasis on agricultural productivity to consider how crop, livestock and tree production interact with broad-based livelihood concerns (i.e. water resources, fuel needs, income). Policy Implications • To operationalize the proposed approach, policy support is needed to expand the mandate of agricultural research organizations from disciplinary to interdisciplinary research agendas, from a focus on technology generation to “system regeneration,” and to incorporate new disciplinary perspectives (social science, systems ecology). • Considerable financial backing for the social sciences is also required to enhance institutional capacity to manage the social and political dynamics inherent in landscape or watershed-level interventions. • Institutional policies for R&D must encourage a shift of focus from the direction of desired change to the magnitude of change required to reverse system decline, and to the capacity of the system to absorb these changes under existing conditions. Doing so will strengthen the policy contributions of research by highlighting was is and is not possible to achieve through local-level action alone.