Making Soil and Water Conservation Sustainable: From Coercion and Control to Partnerships and Participation

For close to a century, rural development policies and practice have taken the view that farmers are mismanagers of soil and water. This paper reviews the history of farmers being advised, paid and forced to adopt new soil and water conservation measures and practices. Many have done so, and environments and economies have benefited in the short term, but ill-conceived policies and badly designed programmes and projects have undermined these efforts in the name of conservation. Most efforts have been remarkably unsuccessful, often resulting in more erosion. They have undermined the credibility of conservation and wasted huge sums of money. For a new era of soil and water conservation, new initiatives are showing how to make conservation sustainable. Farmers are now considered the potential solution rather than the problem, and so the value of local knowledge and skills is being put at the core of new programmes. This involves a major focus on building farmers' capacity to innovate and develop technologies appropriate to their own conditions. Local organizations are strengthened through participatory processes, this participation being interactive and empowering. Recent evidence is indicating that these new interactions between professionals and farmers are producing considerable productive and sustainable benefits. For widespread impact, enabling policy frameworks are still needed to encourage the spread of more sustainable practices for agriculture.