Community participatory models for watershed management: A case study of Bang Pakong river basin

Construction of community participatory model for implementing watershed management was taken the Bang Pakong River Basin in Chachoengsao province as a case study. Theoretically, the degradation of watershed is depending on people participation, the more people participate in management activities is the less the degradation. The philosophy of community participatory models has been taken an account with such words for constructing the multiple regression by using the information of human driving forces, forest cover, and watershed function. The sampling sites were taken on 74 sub-watersheds, and determined forest cover, while the social information were collected by questionnaire and in-depth interviewing from 799 sampling households (18 percent) for evaluating the human driving forces as the causes of changes in structure and function of watershed resources, i.e., population density, age, schooling period, settlement period, land occupancy, income, and water flow and its regime. After the stepwise program was used, the models of community participatory level (CPL) were effectively figured out only 2 outputs, (1) CPL1 : Opinion Participation (proposing, convincing, warning, self doing, and official cooperation) and (2) CPL5 : Participatory Patterns (providing opinion, initiative/meeting, WS committee member, labouring, and donating). The study was also developed the averaged CPL for evaluating the participation needs, opinion participation, involved implementation, participatory frequency, and participatory patterns. The models were expected as the tools for finding means how to organize the watershed management activities. The exact participatory patterns would be the promising guidelines for effectively managing plans to obtain the productive watershed resources and water yields as well as control of soil losses and protection of flooding.