Abstract
In recent years the people in upland areas and their local governments have claimed that the waterusers downstream should take a certain financial responsibility for the improvement of the forested watershed. Corresponding to their demands, such cost sharing schemes as the “Forested Watershed Fund” have been introduced in several regions. Japan has a long history of similar systems in which the water users were involved in various ways, reflecting repeated conflict and co-operation between the people living upstream and those downstream. The purpose of this paper is to retrace the trends, and to pursue some characteristics of the current cost sharing schemes in an historical perspective.
