Ecological Literacy - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 159

farmers' research groups. Hugh Ward and I estimate that between 400,000-
500,000 new groups have formed in these sectors during the 1990s. Most
have evolved to be of small rather than large size, typically with 20 to 30
active members, rising to about 40 for microfinance programmes. 27 This
puts the total individual involvement at between 8 and 14 million people
- a quite remarkable expansion in social capital and the numbers of eco-
logically literate people. The real progress towards sustainability has been
made by these millions of heroes. They have made collective action and
inclusion succeed, and have benefited themselves, as well as the environment.
Watershed and catchment management groups
Governments and non-governmental organizations have increasingly come
to realize that the protection of whole watersheds or catchments cannot
be achieved without the willing participation of local people. Indeed, for
sustainable solutions to emerge, farmers need to be sufficiently motivated
in order to want to use resource-conserving practices on their own farms.
This, in turn, needs investment in participatory processes in order to bring
people together to deliberate on common problems, and to form new
groups or associations capable of developing practices of common
benefit. This led to an expansion in programmes focused upon micro-
catchments - not whole river basins, but areas usually of no more than
several hundred hectares , in which people know and trust each other. The
resulting uptake has been extraordinary, with participatory watershed
programmes reporting substantial yield improvements, together with
substantial public benefits, including groundwater recharge, reappearance
of springs, increased tree cover, microclimate change, increased common
land revegetation, and benefits for local economies. Some 50,000 water-
shed and catchment groups have been formed in the past decade in
Australia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Guatemala, the Honduras, India, Kenya,
Niger, and the US. 28
Water users' groups
Although irrigation is a vital resource for agriculture, water is, rather
surprisingly, rarely used efficiently. Without regulation or control, water
tends to be overused by those who have access to it first, resulting in
shortages for tail-enders, conflicts over water allocation, and waterlogging,
drainage and salinity problems. But where social capital is well developed,
then water users' groups with locally developed rules and sanctions are able
to make more of existing resources than are individuals working alone or