Appropriate interventions for rehabilitating degraded tropical uplands

Land degradation is one of the most serious environmental and developmental problems in the upland regions of developing tropical countries. Immense efforts have been made, with considerable international cooperation, to rehabilitate this land and increase its productivity. However, the achievements of these efforts have been disappointing, largely because of unsuitable technology and implementation strategies. The aim of this study was to establish what are appropriate interventions for rehabilitating degraded tropical upland. Agroforestry was specifically studied because it is the most promising family of rehabilitative technologies for biophysical and economic reasons. 'Appropriate' in this work refers to that which is consonant with principles of sustainable development while being pragmatically aware of current geopolitical constraints on following these principles. An 'intervention' is not only the technology applied at the ground-level to rehabilitate land, but also the necessary institutional and organizational changes for its implementation. A case study of the uplands of Sri Lanka, involving one year's field work, was undertaken to achieve this aim. While adopting a broad human-ecological perspective, the case study employed agroecological and politico-ecological methods to diagnose the causes of land degradation, to prescribe interventions for rehabilitating that land, and to evaluate and plan for the implementation of likely agroforestry interventions. Specifically, it evaluated the 'analog forest' (an agroforestry system which is structurally and functionally analogous to the natural ecosystem) and planned for its implementation in an existing management program in the Upper Mahaweli watershed. Based on the experience gained through this case study, it was concluded that: (1) there is no universally appropriate intervention; (2) the appropriateness of interventions is determined at three nested politico-ecological levels, namely the biophysical, the socio-economic, and the politico-cultural; and (3) it is at the politicocultural level that most difficulties are likely to be found in determining an appropriate intervention. A corollary of the third finding is that international development efforts need to be directed to improving the functioning of national resource-management organizations in developing countries