Harnessing Gender Power and Collective Action Through Integrated Watershed Management for Sustainable Development and minimizing land Degradation

Abstract

Asia emerges as the hot spot for poverty, malnutrition and also for severe landdegradation in the world. In India, the situatioll is similar as out of 852 million poor 221million are in India and 108.6 Mha are degraded. There is an urgent need to break theunholy nexus between drought, land degradation and poverty using communitywatersheds to manage the natural resources such as water and land sustainably forimproving livelihoods. Watershed approach is adopted by .Government of India as agrowth engine for development of rainfed areas. Although these programmes are silentlyrevolutionalizing the drylands all is not well. There is need to address the issues ofgender, equity to enhance participation and associated impact and sustainability of theseprogrammes. Three selected watershed case studies in India were analyzed to study theimpacts, the approaches adopted and most importantly gender analysis for identifying thestrategies to harness the gender power for enhancing the collective action