India's semi-arid tropical (SAT) region is characterized by seasonally concentrated rainfall, low agricultural productivity, degraded natural resources, and substantial human poverty. The green revolution that transformed agriculture elsewhere in India had little impact on rainfed agriculture in the SAT. In the 1980s and 1990s, agricultural scientists and planners aimed to promote rainfed agricultural development through watershed development. A watershed is an area from which all water drains to a common point, making it an attractive unit for technical efforts to manage water and soil resources for production and conservation. Watershed projects are complicated, however, by the fact that watershed boundaries rarely correspond to human-defined boundaries. Also, watershed projects often distribute costs and benefits unevenly, with costs incurred disproportionately upstream, typically among poorer residents, and benefits realized disproportionately downstream, where irrigation is concentrated and the wealthiest farmers own most of the land. Watershed projects take a wide variety of strategies, ranging from those that are more technocratic to those that pay more attention to the social organization of watersheds. By the mid-1990s annual expenditure on watershed development in India approached $500 million, but there was relatively little information available on the success of different project approaches. This study addresses three main research questions: 1) What projects are most successful in promoting the objectives of raising agricultural productivity, improving natural resource management and reducing poverty? 2) What approaches enable them to succeed? 3) What nonproject factors also contribute to achieving these objectives? The major hypotheses are that participatory approaches that devote more attention to social organization yield superior project impact, and that favorable economic conditions and good infrastructure also support better natural resource management and higher productivity. A detailed survey of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh states covered 86 villages under several watershed projects as well as nonproject villages with no project. The projects covered operated under the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Rural Development, various nongovernment organizations (NGOs), and in collaboration between NGOs and the Government of Maharashtra. The government projects were more technocratic in focus, whereas the NGO projects focused more on social organization, and the government-nongovernment collaborative projects tried to draw on the strengths of both approaches. The analysis of the Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh villages compared pre- and post-project conditions in the study villages. Quantitative analysis at the village level addressed performance indicators such as changes in access to water for irrigation and drinking, change in employment opportunities, soil erosion and conservation on uncultivated lands and drainage lines, and change in availability of various products from the common (government revenue) lands. At the plot level, performance indicators included changes in cropping intensity, change in yields, soil erosion on cultivated lands, farmers' land improvement investments, and annual net returns to cultivation. This analysis was supplemented by qualitative information about the effects of the projects on different interest groups in the villages such as farmers with irrigation, farmers without irrigation, landless people, shepherds, and women. Findings of the empirical study in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh lend support to the hypothesis that more participatory projects perform better than their more technocratic, top-down counterparts, and that a combination of participation and sound technical input may perform the best of all. Evidence about the role of economic conditions and infrastructure is more limited. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, successful participatory projects remain few in number so their impact is limited. In the study area in rainfed areas of Maharashtra's Pune and Ahmednagar districts, for example, the innovative projects operated in only 40 out of over 1000 villages, even though they are particularly highly concentrated in this area compared to the rest of India. Also, the most successful projects enjoyed special treatment that will be difficult to replicate on a large scale. Spreading participatory watershed development throughout the country will not be easy. One continuing challenge for almost all projects is in designing interventions and organizing communities so that benefits are distributed more evenly to landless people, shepherds and women. These are the least influential community members and their needs and interests require special attention. Otherwise watershed projects can actually make them worse off than before by restricting their access to resources that contribute to their livelihoods. Unstructured interviews with these groups suggested that all of the Maharashtra projects have room for improvement in serving their needs. Some NGOs in Andhra Pradesh have developed innovative ways to build everyone's interests into the projects in advance, and other projects would gain by learning from them.