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 a renas to move toward broader units of analysis and intervention, including the landscape, catchment and wa tershed. 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 comp onent-specific contributions to la ndscape degradatio n, 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 applic ation 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.

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