Factors influencing people's participation in Watershed Management Programs

During the last years land and water resources in Iran have suffered severe degradation. In this regard government of Iran has established several policies to Sustainable Management of Land and Water Resources during the last years. Most of these efforts have taken top down strategy. Watershed management program is one of the current approaches to sustainable management of land and water resources in Iran. It was started at the time of third Iranian 5th socio economic and cultural development plan; as a strategy to land and water resources development. In recent year’s government has developed participatory approach in watershed management in several areas. Hable-Rud program is one of these programs to sustainable management of land and water resources in Iran which is initiated as a joint program of UNDP and Islamic Republic of Iran in 1997. The degree of popular participation in such programs is a major determinant of success or failure, but the factors which make participation efforts successful still remained a mystery. This study was designed to discover this mystery and determine the factors that influence local people’s participation in such programs. The data for this study were gathered from 200 respondents through personal interview. Descriptive analysis, Parsons Product moment correlation and regression analysis was used to analyze the data. The findings of study showed that level of participation in program was moderate; however people preferred more involvement in social rather than economical and environmental activities. Correlation analysis showed that factors: satisfaction of prior programs, attitude toward program, knowledge of program, alternative income, marital status, sex and expectations of program have positive relationship with level of participation. Regression analysis discovered that these factors provided the best prediction for the level of people’s participation and explained 52.5% of the variation.