PIM and System Improvement

Issues and opportunities. Participatory irrigation management opens many opportunities to make the improvement of irrigation system infrastructure and management more productive, better combining local knowledge and external expertise, using money and other resources more efficiently and make irrigation management more sustainable. Making investments more productive. Participatory irrigation reforms have repeatedly shown how government investments in irrigation can be made more productive, while mobilizing greater inputs of knowledge, labor, money and other inputs from water users. Local knowledge helps to better identify and prioritize problems, and find good solutions to problems. When irrigators' organizations are empowered to control investments in irrigation infrastructure they typically find many ways to reduce waste, control corruption, and spend money more wisely.

Optimizing infrastructure. Participatory reforms can integrate changes in institutional software with improvements in physical hardware. Rather than rehabilitation that only seeks to restore infrastructure to its earlier condition, there is a chance to look at what combination of changes in infrastructure and operational arrangements can best serve water users. Rather than only upgrading to install more modern technology, there is a chance to select which physical and managerial changes will best help solve existing problems and improve irrigation system performance.

Designing for participation. Joint system walkthroughs, public meetings, facilition by community organizers and other techniques have proven their value in enabling greater involvement of users in planning irrigation improvements and producing better, more productive designs. Such techniques can help adapt designs to the ways in which users actually will operate schemes, helping avoid inappropriate, overambitious and unworkable designs. At the same time, participatory design processes can help users to better understand and benefit from technical expertise, formulating better solutions to the problems they face and improving their technical knowledge and capacity. Nevertheless there is still much potential for further adapting irrigation designs to local conditions and participatory management.

Realigning incentives. A central challenge for irrigation reform is to escape from being trapped in a cycle of deferred maintenance, poor performance and wasteful premature rehabilitation. This requires restructuring the incentives that frequently induce water users and irrigation managers to neglect preventive maintenance and wait for rehabilitation by externally subsidized projects. Irrigation management transfer has sometimes been seen as a way to reduce government irrigation budgets by shifting the costs of irrigation operation and maintence to users. Reforms have certainly shown that when users are involved and confident that their money and labor will be spent wisely, they are willing to contribute much more to irrigation. However participatory irrigation management can only sustainably escape the trap of deferred maintenance and dependence on externally subsidized rehabilitation if those responsible for managing irrigation systems have the incentives and capacity to carry out preventive maintenance and invest in major repairs and improvements to infrastructure. Changes in how civil works are planned and implemented need to be accompanied by changes in how irrigation is financed, as discussed in the topic page on financing PIM.

Sources for additional information:

1. Participation in planning irrigation system construction, typically facilitated by community organizers, was a central element of early PIM reforms in the Philippines, Sri Lanka and elsewhereas discussed in Korten, Frances F., and Robert Y. Siy, Jr. 1988. Transforming a Bureaucracy: The Experience of the Philippine National Irrigation Administration. West Hartford, Connecticut: Kumarian and Uphoff, Norman. 1991. Learning from Gal Oya: Possibilities for Participatory Development and Post-Newtonian Social Science. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
2. Irrigation rehabilitation was identified as a major "second generation" issue which needed to be addressed to make irrigation management transfer sustainable.
3. For analysis of the advantages of preventive maintenance see Maintaining the value of irrigation and drainage projects and Realizing the value of irrigation system maintenance.
4. For a note and discussion from the 2001 IMT e-mail conference see Modernization of Irrigation Infrastructure and Management Services
5. A series of thematic papers and case studies on "Governing Maintenance Provision in Irrigation" are available from the MAINTAIN project homepage.
6. Additional documents on irrigation improvement and PIM can be found by searching this website, and through search engines such as Google.