Governing Water Resource Allocation: Water User Association Characteristics and the Role of the State

Water, as a common pool resource, is threatened by the possibility of overextraction generating a negative economic impact, conflicts among users, and greater income inequality. Scholars have discussed different governance approaches to deal with this threat, including centralized governance and self-governance, and lately, special attention has been paid to the interactions between formal institutions (the state) and local water user associations and how this promotes self-governance. The aim of this paper was to examine the adoption of Ostrom’s design principles present in the legal norms dictated in the Chilean Water Code by water user associations and to analyze the roles of their size, community homogeneity, and perceived water stress on adopting legal norms. The results showed that water communities generally follow the rules established in the Water Code, but the voting system, distribution of water, and fee payment are adjusted in small and homogenous water user associations. We can also conclude that a cornerstone in the system is implementing graduated sanctions, as water users see the tools provided by the Water Code as ineffective.

Irrigation Post-Modernization. Farmers Envisioning Irrigation Policy in the Region of Valencia (Spain)

During the last three decades, like many other Mediterranean states, Spain has intensively promoted the modernization of irrigation, focusing mainly on the introduction of pressurized irrigation systems. Following 30 years of investment, a shift in irrigation policies is needed to solve some of the deficiencies in this modernization process and to incorporate new measures to cope with upcoming challenges generated by international markets, climate change and other social and economic processes. This paper describes and analyses the results of participatory research carried out with the water user associations in the autonomous region of Valencia, in order to define post-modernization irrigation policies. A survey and 24 local workshops involving 304 water user associations were conducted during the irrigation season of 2018 in order to form an assessment of the sector and design new irrigation policies. The results show that after 30 years of important investment, the obsolescence of the infrastructure has become the current main priority, making farmers dependent on public subsidies. New necessities have also emerged, such as renewable energies and nonconventional water resources, which farmers consider indispensable in order to reduce operating costs and guarantee water supply.

Irrigation Water Management Practices in Upper West Region of Ghana: Prospects, Challenges and Mitigation Measures

Water is vital for agricultural production especially in arid areas like the Upper West Region (UWR) in Ghana. The management of water resources for irrigation is therefore paramount. Irrigation Water Management practices (IWM) and their potential for boosting agricultural productivity and food security in UWR are examined in this paper with focus on three purposively sampled irrigation schemes at Sankana, Busa and Yelayiri. Thirty sampled members of Water User Associations (WUAs) and leaders from each of the schemes were interviewed for their views on IWM practices and challenges. Additionally, 10 agricultural experts also provided their views. The quantitative data were analysed with SPSS whiles the qualitative information was subjected to content and discourse analyses. Crosstab correlation helped to determine the relationship between WUAs/farmers’ IWM practices and the performance of the schemes whiles pairwise ranking helped to reveal the severity of IWM challenges and appropriate measures recommended for fixing them.

Analyzing the Performances of Water User Associations to Increase the Irrigation Sustainability: An Application of Multivariate Statistics to a Case Study in Italy

Benchmarking techniques are useful and simple tools to analyze the performance of the collective irrigation in the Water User Associations (WUAs) towards an increase in service sustainability. Several benchmarking techniques have been proposed to process and predict performance indicators. Instead, some meaningful statistical techniques based on the distance of data samples, which overcome the limitations of the traditional benchmarking techniques, have never been applied to the collective irrigation sector. This study applies Permutational Multivariate Analysis of Variance (PERMANOVA), Multidimensional Scale Models (MDS), and Distance-Based Linear Models (DISTLM) as benchmarking techniques to evaluate the technical and financial performances of 10 WUAs in Calabria (Southern Italy). These benchmarking techniques revealed that the significant differences in the irrigated areas and financial self-sufficiency of the WUAs, shown by PERMANOVA, depend on the large variability of the remaining performance indicators. Both the MDS and DISTLM demonstrated that a higher number of associated users and larger irrigation service coverage allows an increase in the irrigated areas; this enlargement is facilitated if the water price and the size of the personnel staff decrease. The WUAs’ self-sufficiency is mainly influenced by the number of workers and the maintenance, organization, and management costs, while the impacts of the due service fees and water price are more limited; it is also convenient to increase the number of the associated farmers since this increases the economy of scale and the gross revenues of the irrigation service. Overall, from the analysis carried out for the regional case study, these benchmarking techniques seem to be powerful and easy tools to identify the problems of the irrigation service and help in planning the most suitable policies to improve the sustainability of the collective irrigation at the regional scale.

Are Water User Associations Prepared for a Second-Generation Modernization? The Case of the Valencian Community (Spain)

This work focuses on the situation of the technological transition to new technologies in drip irrigation in the Valencian Community (Spain). The study covers the last decade with data from interviews to managers of Irrigation Communities in 2010 and 2018. We analyze the main technological problems in seven topics: (i) Catchment & Pumping; (ii) Storage & Regulation; (iii) Treatment & Filtering; (iv) Transport & Distribution; (v) Maneuver, Regulation & Protection; (vi) Automation; (vii) Theft and Vandalism. We also have researched the influence of the performance of the Automation system, the presence of a technician in the Irrigation Community and the use of sensors or climatic data. Results show that problems related to technological maintenance of filtering systems or automation are very common and important and they are more important in large Irrigation Communities. We have also observed that mostly large ICs are using sensors or climatic data for their irrigation schedule. We can conclude that their current situation is focused in the daily maintenance of technological problems, inherited from the first modernization processes at the beginning of 21st century. Hence, they are far away from a second stage of modernization or the smart irrigation pushed by the new advances on technology.

Participatory Exclusion in Water User Associations: A Subaltern Perspective

Although Participatory Irrigation Management envisions democratic participation and equity in water sharing among farmers , this article while investigating the challenges of Dalit farmers in Water User Associations and access to surface or ground water for irrigation, espouse the perpetuation of ‘Participatory Exclusion’ of Dalit farmers in canal water sharing and rights in water user associations . Since caste discrimination is embedded in modern user organizations, participatory exclusion of Dalit farmers operates at all levels of membership, participation and representation in PIMinrural Tamil Nadu.