SA62 3 MULTI-LEVEL PARTICIPATORY PLANNING FOR WATER RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT IN SRI LANKA K … meetings and contributed to the analysis and planning efforts by providing analytic concepts … GATEKEEPER SERIES NO. SA62 1 This Gatekeeper Series is produced by the International Institute for Environment and Development to highlight key topics in the field of sustainable agriculture. Each paper reviews a selected issue of contemporary importance and draws preliminary conclusions of relevance to development activities. References are …

Participatory approaches have been shown to be effective for natural resource development planning. In most of these cases, however, the planning unit has been a village or small settlement area. This leads to the problem of how to ‘scale up’ a participatory approach when supra-community level planning is needed. Supra-community level planning is necessary for water resources development. As water flows from place to place, the actions of one local community affect water availability for local communities downstream. Thus water resources development planning should be undertaken by multi-community groups so that the interests of all the communities within the water basin can be properly served. This paper describes a multi-level approach to participatory water resources planning. In the multi-level approach, meetings are held with farmers in local communities to get an initial information base and to introduce the planning approach and concepts. Then participants from different local communities within a watershed meet at participatory planning sessions to exchange information about local conditions in different parts of the watershed. The participants use the enlarged information base to prepare water resources development plans for the whole watershed. This approach ensures that all local interests are reflected in the plans. This approach was used in Sri Lanka to plan small tank (reservoir) rehabilitation activities. Preliminary studies found that farmers had little idea about the hydrology of parts of the watersheds outside their village areas. The multi-level approach gave farmers the knowledge to prepare workable proposals for improving water distribution within the sub-watershed. Without the multi-level approach, farmers could only suggest fixing their tanks, an activity that would have little development effect since it would not increase irrigation water. The sub-watershed level plans, however, included means for augmenting tank water supplies and thus increasing irrigated area. The success of the approach was due partly to the constructive blend of scientists’ knowledge of the watershed hydrology and the farmers’ detailed knowledge of local hydrology, farming systems, and their own needs. A key point was that the farmers shared their local knowledge with farmers from other villages to produce useful watershed level knowledge and plans.

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