Water Users Associations (WUAs) are all too often considered a panacea for improving water management in irrigation schemes. Where grassroots movements are absent, they are usually imposed on farmers by national governments, NGOs, and international donors, without fully considering existing forms of organization. This also happened in the Office du Niger irrigation scheme in Mali, where after a partial irrigation management transfer, WUAs were created to fill the resulting power vacuum. This paper demonstrates that, despite active efforts to organize farmers in WUAs, informal patterns of decision making remain dominant. Given the shortcomings of these informal patterns, WUAs could provide a much‐needed platform for institutionalizing collective action, on the condition that farmers accept them. Therefore WUAs should adopt some crucial characteristics of informal patterns of decision making while avoiding their weaknesses. First, making use of the existing authority of village leadership and the central management can improve the credibility of WUAs. Second, allowing flexibility in procedures and rules can make them more appropriate for dealing with collective action problems that are typically temporary and specific. Last, formalizing the current pattern of conflict management and sanctioning might enhance its sphere of action and tackle the current absence of firm engagement with respect to some informal management decisions. In addition, WUAs should represent and be accountable to all farmers, including those residing outside the village community.

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Increasing irrigation efficiency in irrigation schemes has always been high on the agenda of policy makers. Despite quite some 'social' experiments, whereby large portions of management were carried over to the farmer level, results often remained disappointing. This paper explores why this came about for a case study in the Office du Niger irrigation scheme in Mali. Since Irrigation Management Transfer, farmers are responsible for the tertiary level, but collective action for water management remains below expectations. This paper applies an analytical framework based on the conceptual model developed by van Noordwijk et al. (Conserv Ecol 5:21, 2002) and proceeding in two steps. Firstly, an interview-based stakeholder analysis assesses the objectives and mental models of farmers and the central management regarding water management. It appears from the interviews that the central management wants to increase irrigation efficiency through fully-fledged collective action, whereas farmers value the latter only when it favours easy irrigation. Secondly, the relation between collective action and performance was tested through a field study on a sample of 36 tertiary blocks. Results indicate that only collective action at the inlet of the tertiary canal, currently implemented on less than a third of the tertiary blocks, increases irrigation efficiency (with 14%). Collective action for water allocation is implemented within almost three quarters of tertiary blocks and effectively reduces irrigation problems. However, if they lack the necessary social capital, not all farmers can establish collective action when needed. Based on this analysis, the paper proposes a mix of incentives and measures to resolve the conflict between farmers and the central management to their mutual benefit.

The Office du Niger is a centrally managed collective irrigation scheme of 80 000 ha, mainly cultivated with flooded rice. In the context of recent reforms, water distribution and maintenance at the tertiary canal level were left to farmers. In this paper, their ability to resolve collective action problems through devising, monitoring and enforcing rules is diagnosed through a questionnaire survey of 89 farmers on 59 tertiary canals from five villages. Results show that rules are devised only on 30 and 24% of the canals for water distribution and maintenance respectively. Moreover, there is often no consensus on rules among farmers, and monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms are absent. This results in individualistic behavior causing problems concerning water distribution and maintenance for respectively 20 and 43% of the interviewed farmers. Ineffectiveness of peer pressure and farmers' incomplete mentality shift towards assuming collective responsibility are impediments to successful organization of water management. With water supply being abundant and the infrastructure recently rehabilitated, organization of water management at tertiary level is, however, not always required in order to avoid problems. On the other hand, the current state of affairs is not considered sustainable, as the irrigated area will strongly expand and the irrigation infrastructure ages with time. Measures of sensitization and group empowerment accompanying the process of management transfer will therefore be desirable. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. key words: irrigation; water management; irrigation management transfer; collective action; rules; Mali RÉ SUMÉ L'Office du Niger est un périmètre rizicole collectif de 80 000 ha avec une gestion centralisée. Dans le cadre de réformes, la distribution de l'eau et l'entretien au niveau tertiaire du réseau ont été transférés aux exploitants. Ce papier a comme sujet une diagnostique sur leur capacité de résoudre des problèmes d'action collective en montant et imposant des règles. La recherche est basée sur des enquêtes avec 89 exploitants de 59 canaux tertiaires et cinq villages. Les résultats montrent que des règles sont définies seulement dans 30 et 24% des canaux pour respectivement la distribution de l'eau et l'entretien. En plus, souvent il n'y a pas de consensus sur les règles parmi les exploitants, et des moyens de les contrôler et imposer sont absents. Il en résulte que des stratégies individualistes dominent, produisant des problèmes concernant la distribution de l'eau et l'entretien pour respectivement 20 et 43% des exploitants enquêtés. L'inefficacité de pression sociale et l'adoption incomplète