Prioritizing the Affecting Factors on Nonparticipation of Rural Communities in Watershed Management Projects from a Stakeholders Viewpoint (Case Study: Gheshlagh Watershed, Fars Province)

Paying attention to stakeholder participation and identifying affecting factors on nonparticipation of rural communities and eliminating its implementation barriers in watershed management projects enable the potential of intellectual, executive, supervisory and indigenous knowledge of stakeholders in different stages of studies, implementation, evaluation and maintenance. This will reduce costs, guarantee success and make projects more effective. In order to achieve this goal in this study, affecting factors on non-participation of rural communities in watershed management plans were prioritized from the viewpoint of stakeholders by analyzing four indices and twelve sub-indices with Likert spectrum in Gheshlagh watershed located in the north of Fars province. The frequency and relative abundance of indices and sub-indices were determined in SPSS software (version 23) and the t-test was used to determine their significance. Then, the relationship between each index and its sub-index was determined using correlation coefficients and Friedman nonparametric test was used to prioritize the effective indexes and sub-index. The results showed that in the prioritization of indicators from the stakeholder point of view, "educational-promotion", "economic", "social", and "design-executive" indices were the effective factors, respectively and in sub-prioritization of sub-categories "lack of training of basin residents on related plans and objectives" and "ethnic and local differences", had the highest and lowest priority in nonparticipation in watershed planning, respectively. In order to sustainable participation of rural communities in watershed management projects, it is necessary to develop a comprehensive program of training and solve the "economic" problems of stakeholders and promotion of practical actions.