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Community Responses to Government Defunding of Watershed Projects: A Comparative Study in India and the USA

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Abstract

When central governments decentralize natural resource management (NRM), they often retain an interest in the local efforts and provide funding for them. Such outside investments can serve an important role in moving community-based efforts forward. At the same time, they can represent risks to the community if government resources are not stable over time. Our focus in this article is on the effects of withdrawal of government resources from community-based NRM. A critical question is how to build institutional capacity to carry on when the government funding runs out. This study compares institutional survival and coping strategies used by community-based project organizations in two different contexts, India and the United States. Despite higher links to livelihoods, community participation, and private benefits, efforts in the Indian cases exhibited lower survival rates than did those in the U.S. cases. Successful coping strategies in the U.S. context often involved tapping into existing institutions and resources. In the Indian context, successful coping strategies often involved building broad community support for the projects and creatively finding additional funding sources. On the other hand, the lack of local community interest, due to the top-down development approach and sometimes narrow benefit distribution, often challenged organizational survival and project maintenance.

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Notes

  1. Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, in its guideline issued recently in 2012 states the possibility of diverting its funding to maintain or expand the assets constructed during the watershed work (GOI 2012). The earlier guidelines in 2008, was less clear about the modalities of convergence of the two programs (GOI 2008).

  2. The present situation of availability of funding is somewhat different since the Government of India has sought a convergence between the WDPs and MGNREGS such that the post-project requirements of WDPs are met by MGNREGS funds. The primary objective of the latter project is employment generation for the economically marginalized, and sustainability of the source for employment generation is aided by repair and maintenance work of the assets of the old WDP projects.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the European Union and the Development Support Centre, Ahmedabad for the funding and the logistic support for this Madhya Pradesh fieldwork, which was done as part of a larger project entitled “Post- Project Management and Use of WDF In the Watershed Development Programmes in Four States.” The Ohio fieldwork was conducted as part of the Nehru-Fulbright Senior Research Grant that the second author received, during which time she was affiliated with The Ohio State University.

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  1. School of Environment and Natural Resources, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Tomas M. Koontz

  2. Centre for Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

    Sucharita Sen

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  1. Tomas M. Koontz
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  2. Sucharita Sen
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Correspondence to Tomas M. Koontz.

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Koontz, T.M., Sen, S. Community Responses to Government Defunding of Watershed Projects: A Comparative Study in India and the USA. Environmental Management 51, 571–585 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-012-0008-2

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