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Affecting behavioural change is a common underlying goal across environmental and agricultural sciences, from climate change mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity conservation, water management, to crop diversification. However, many projects fail to drive or sustain change despite sound science and good intentions. This paper draws on existing theories of behavioural change to construct a conceptual framework that explores pathways to initiate and sustain change through the lens of empowerment, self-efficacy and agency. The framework is demonstrated with case studies from a project in India and Bangladesh that examined social inclusion of marginalised and poor farmers in the context of intensifying agriculture. The framework and case studies highlight that a number of conditions are needed to affect meaningful change including that target beneficiaries are suitably motivated, believe in their own capability and power to enact change and have access to the necessary resources. We propose the framework as a tool to help project teams explore the underlying elements of the process of change when designing, implementing and assessing agricultural or environmental projects and interventions. We contend that behavioural and social change needs to be explicitly fostered in such endeavours to achieve better and longer-term outcomes for the people and environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last four decades, the Indian government has been investing heavily in watershed development (WSD) programmes that are intended to improve the livelihoods of rural agrarian communities and maintain or improve natural resource condition. Given the massive investment in WSD in India, and the recent shift from micro-scale programmes (<500 ha) to meso-scale (~5000 ha) clusters, robust methodological frameworks are needed to measure and analyse impacts of interventions across landscapes as well as between and within communities. In this paper, the sustainable livelihoods framework is implemented using Bayesian networks (BNs) to develop models of drought resilience and household livelihoods. Analysis of the natural capital component model provides little evidence that watershed development has influenced household resilience to drought and indicators of natural capital, beyond an increased area of irrigation due to greater access to groundwater. BNs have proved a valuable tool for implementing the sustainable livelihoods framework in a retrospective evaluation of implemented WSD programmes. Many of the challenges of evaluating watershed interventions using BNs are the same as for other analytical approaches. These are reliance on retrospective studies, identification and measurement of relevant indicators and isolating intervention impacts from contemporaneous events. The establishment of core biophysical and socio-economic indicators measured through longitudinal household surveys and monitoring programmes will be critical to the success of BNs as an evaluation tool for meso-scale WSD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]