Making Soil and Water Conservation Sustainable 387degradation processes are a bitter pill to swallow.’ Despite this, the project staff
believed that: ‘the favourable results of destocking have sparked an interest in tak-
ing similar measures, particularly in the region’s other districts’ (in Mndeme,
1992).
In Somalia, a large FAO-funded project constructed dams during the 1970s to
check gullies, but because of poor construction, many collapsed or diverted the
floods, so accelerating gully erosion instead of preventing it. This induced wide-
spread disenchantment amongst local people for all conservation projects that fol-
lowed (Reij, 1988). Such attitudes remain a critical constraint for many current
soil conservation efforts.
Elements of Sustainable and Participatory Soil and
Water Conservation Programmes
A brief summary of impacts
By most performance measures, conventional conservation programmes have been
remarkable failures. Little has changed over the course of this century. Large sums
of money have been spent in the name of environmental protection encouraging
and coercing farmers to adopt conservation measures, but poor implementation
by outside technical teams means that few structures persist, so causing erosion
rather than preventing it. The result has been widespread discrediting of conserva-
tion projects and programmes in the eyes of the rural people themselves. However,
the issue and costs of soil erosion will not go away. The challenge remains enor-
mous.
There is now emerging evidence that regenerative and resource-conserving
technologies and practices can bring both environmental and economic benefits
for farmers and communities (Hinchcliffe et al, 1995; Pretty, 1995a; Shaxson,
1996). Importantly, these breakthroughs have come on fanners’ fields and in rural
communities. It has long been known that resource-conserving technologies will
work in research stations, but somehow they have not been widely adopted by farm-
ers. Now, as a result of agricultural professionals increasingly working with and learn-
ing from farmers, new productive options are being developed (Table 16.2).
There are now a growing number of programmes that have been sufficiently
successful to suggest the need for application on a much wider scale (Shaxson,
1996). All of these successes have elements in common. Farmers have been a cen-
tral part of the process of innovation and adaptation of resource-conserving tech-
nologies. There has been action by groups and communities at local level, with
farmers becoming experts at managing farms as ecosystems, and at collectively man-
aging the watersheds or other resource units of which their farms form a part. There
have also been supportive and enabling external government and/or non-govern-
ment institutions, often working in new partnerships with new participatory