The Political Economy of Water Security, Ecosystem Services and Livelihoods in the Western Himalayas

This project aims to study the ways in which small towns in hill and mountain regions of South Asia depend on springs, streams and rivers in their surrounding catchments for the supply of water. Current infrastructure planning processes for water supply in low income countries tend to focus on the needs of large urban settlements, or of rural areas, and the needs of small towns are often overlooked or neglected. Small towns (defined as those with populations below 100,000 people) are particularly important in hill and mountain regions of India and Nepal because they have grown very rapidly, with little planning for infrastructure needs more generally, and for water supply in particular. Across the region, almost half the urban population in the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, and in the hill regions of Nepal, live in small towns. These towns also tend to be relatively resource poor, lacking the revenue and resources available to larger settlements, and their populations and settlement patterns usually display peri-urban and semi-rural characteristics, making infastructure planning and provision particularly challenging.

The project will work in a selected set of small towns in the two Indian states, and in the hill regions of Nepal. It will undertake an assessment of the hydrological dependence of these small towns on water flows from the surrounding landscape, and identify areas that are critical to securing these water flows ('critical water zones'). The project will study existing patterns of resource and land use in these critical water zones, and the range of ecosystem services that flow from these areas to meet the needs of local and non-local stakeholders. This will allow an understanding of the synergies and trade-offs associated with managing these areas to secure water supply for the towns, in relation to their potential use for other livelihood and resource use strategies.

The project will work directly with local government officials, and local communities in both urban and rural areas in these towns and their surrounding catchments, to explore the possibility for negotiating agreements that protect these critical water zones, without adversely affecting livelihood options for upstream residents. The project will also explore, where appropriate, the possibility of compensation based mechanisms to offset costs associated with changes in resource and landuse patterns undertaken by upstream communities in order to secure water supplies in these catchments.

The learning from this project is particularly important for understanding the ways in which urban and rural areas interact with each other in the context of flows of ecosystem services. The hydrological dependence of small towns on their surrounding ecosystems provides the potential for negotiated agreements that secure water supplies to these towns (especially the urban poor), while also ensuring secure livelihoods for upstream local communities, and protecting and enhancing a range of other ecosystem functions in the surrounding watersheds. This project will explore the conditions under which such synergies can be realized, while also exploring and highlighting the trade-offs and difficult choices that characterize decision making in such contexts.

BENEFICIARIES FROM THE RESEARCH: The key beneficiaries from this research will be:
(i) Local stakeholders in each of the project sites, including village and town populations living in and around the project areas, government officials, local researchers, civil society actors, as well as downstream users of ecosystem services. These local stakeholders will specifically benefit from project-generated knowledge about ecosystem based interventions for providing sustainable supplies of water and other ecosystem services from local watersheds in the mountain regions surrounding small towns in the Western Himalayas.
(ii) Policy makers in India and Nepal, who will benefit from project insights about the potential for ecosystem service based interventions to deliver pro-poor livelihood strategies for both urban and rural residents in catchments surrounding small towns, and the potential of zoning as a strategy for the sustainable delivery of ecosystem services and poverty alleviation;
(iii) Civil society and non-governmental organizations, engaged in the water sector, town planning, and environment and development activities in India and Nepal, who will benefit from project learning about the roles of ecosystem service based interventions for water and livelihood security;
(iv) The broader South Asian academic community working on issues of ecosystem services and human well-being, as well as water security for urban areas, because of the new knowledge generated by the project, as well as research techniques developed, and new databases produced;
(v) The international academic community, which will benefit from project outputs detailing key findings, and highlighting the role of ecosystems in supporting water security and livelihoods in rural and semi-urban montane environments in low income countries; and
(vi) international decision makers, including donors (both bilateral (DFID), and multilateral (the World Bank, GEF, Asian Development Bank)) and international organisations (such as IUCN and UNEP), who will potentially use project findings to inform sectoral and country strategies for the use of ecosystems for securing urban water supplies to small towns, and for addressing livelihood needs (especially in montane environments).

The project partners have considerable experience in promoting the uptake of their research, having been funded over the last decade by projects from DFID's Natural Resource Systems Programme and Forestry Research Programme, and from the ESPA Programme, amongst others. The PI, Dr Vira, is leading an ESPA-funded Research Into Use project, which is specifically focused on reviewing the experience of how research findings are put to use in a range of related sectors; he is collaborating closely with the University of Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy (http://www.csap.cam.ac.uk/), which exists to promote engagement between academic researchers and policy makers in government and the business sectors. He is also centrally involved with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (http://www.conservation.cam.ac.uk/), a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and conservation organizations which allows direct opportunities for influencing conservation practice across a wide range of field locations across the world.

Both CEDAR and SIAS have close engagement with local policy communities in the region, and will ensure that there is significant stakeholder engagement with project findings. Prof Singh (CEDAR) has held senior advisory positions at state government level in Uttarakhand, and continues to play an influential role in policy dialogues. Mr Agarwal has worked closely with the Himachal Pradesh government, and with the Ministry of Environment and Forests in Delhi. SIAS convenes the Nepal Policy Research Network (http://nepalpolicynet.com/), which has been established to facilitate the research-policy dialogue. Dr Ojha has also worked with the DFID Research Into Use Programme.