Prioritizing Barriers to People's Participation in Soil and Water Conservation Projects (A Case Study: Eastern Iran)

Identifying and prioritizing barriers to people's participation (PPBs) in is a prerequisite for implementing participatory soil and water conservation projects (SWCPs). Comparison evaluation of the local community and experts perspectives on the PPBs has rarely been investigated. Therefore, in the current study the level of agreement on the PPBs importance from the perspectives two groups were examined. For this purpose, Dastgerd, Asadli and Emarat watersheds, eastern Iran, with different socio-economic conditions were selected. In the current study the 13 important PPBs in implementation of SWCPs were identifying, which can be used as a model in future studies of other watersheds. Then the indicators were prioritized using Friedman Test. Finally, the two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov Test was also used to examine the agreement of the two views on the importance of the items. The results of PPBs prioritization based on 215 local people and 51expert’s viewpoints showed that lake of participatory guidelines, expert oriented decision-making process and lack of incentives economic in implementation of SWCPs are the most important PPBs. The results of two-samples Kolmogorov-Smirnov test show that the opinions of people and experts regarding the importance and role of 65% PPBs have a significant difference. The disagreement between the opinions of the two groups is a barrier to achieving the goals of participatory SWCPs. Also, removing barriers related to economic-executive factors has a high effect on increasing the level of participation and encouraging voluntary participate in SWCPs.