Negotiating land and water use: participatory planning of resource management

Negotiating land and water use: participatory planning of resource management

Descripción

This analysis is based on two major observations: firstly, that land and resource users adapt their practices to limitations on natural resources. Secondly, that external stakeholders adapt their perspectives and approaches to these new behaviors, which raise new theoretical and practical questions and complicate attempts to identify, analyse and comprehend natural resource use. Methodologies developed with the goal of guaranteeing equitable and sustainable resources use are progressiv ely being revised to address these new limitations and changing practices, in particular by promoting the use of participative land and resource planning and management. Approaches that put people and their relationships with their environment first should allow local populations to define adequate, sustainable ways of using the water and land resources available to them. Progressive negotiation processes -that gradually address as many aspects of land and water resource management a s possible- do just this. They take advantage of political and administrative decentralization, and encourage intermediary levels of government to link resource management at the local and national levels by balancing local expectations with broader concerns. They also use participative approach to fully involve all actors that are affected by resource exploitation and regeneration. Land and water management are therefore best addressed using a participatory, negotiated rural develop ment approach, because it uses a variety of different tools and perspectives to tackle the issues explored in this chapter. We would like to demonstrate the comparative advantage of using a territorial approach, which thanks to an integrated view of the environment, combines participative techniques with sustainable environmental management.