Rapid hydrological appraisal in the context of environmental service rewards

Agriculture usually implies impacts on the broad complex of 'watershed functions', if we take a natural forest without any human presence as point of reference. Forest protection as part of watershed management is often (still) considered to provide downstream economic benefits that may well exceed the local benefits of agricultural use but traditional land use rights of people in the upland mean that forms of rewards or compensation are needed to ensure that land use decisions in the uplands align with what may be optimal resource use at a larger scale of consideration.Especially where hydro-electricity schemes derive substantial economic benefits from the continued flow of water, the concept of payments for watershed protection services has become popular. However, there is no shared opinion among scientists, farmers and policy makers about what these services really are, how they depend on the condition of the landscape (and the amount of forest that is part of it) and how payments or rewards can be made transparent (linking reward to delivery) and robust (surviving paradigm shifts). To judge how far apart the potential partners in a rewards mechanism are and what it would take to bridge the 'perception' and 'communication' gaps in the way the local 'forest and water' debate has developed, a form of 'rapid appraisal' is needed. The experience of the 'Rewarding Upland Poor for the Environmental Services they provide' (RUPES) consortium has shown that the overall likelihood of achieving negotiated reward mechanisms depends on four aspects: shared perceptions of the way identifiable watershed functions are influenced by upland land use, and affect downstream interests; the existence of trade-offs between the local utility of upland land use decisions and these identifiable watershed functions; the presence of community scale institutions that effectively constrain individual land use decisions and that can secure compliance with agreements; between local communities, governments and outside actors as a basic condition for negotiations and compliance by all partners to agreements. The guidelines presented here allow for a 'rapid appraisal' (over a 6-month period) of the hydrological situation and the perceptions of key stakeholders (value, threat and opportunity) to enable an appraisal of the opportunities for negotiating land use agreements that include rewards for the protection or rehabilitation of watershed functions in the uplands.

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