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.

Boosting the productivity of smallholder farming systems continues to be a major need in Africa. Challenges relating to how to improve irrigation are multi‐factor and multisectoral, and they involve a broad range of actors who must interact to reach decisions collectively. We provide a systematic reflection on findings from the research project EAU4Food, which adopted a transdisciplinary approach to irrigation for food security research in five case studies in Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, South Africa and Tunisia. The EAU4Food experiences emphasize that actual innovation at irrigated smallholder farm level remains limited without sufficient improvement of the enabling environment and taking note of the wider political economy environment. Most project partners felt at the end of the project that the transdisciplinary approach has indeed enriched the research process by providing different and multiple insights from actors outside the academic field. Local capacity to facilitate transdisciplinary research and engagement with practitioners was developed and could support the continuation and scaling up of the approach. Future projects may benefit from a longer time frame to allow for deeper exchange of lessons learned among different stakeholders and a dedicated effort to analyse possible improvements of the enabling environment from the beginning of the research process. © 2020 The Authors. Irrigation and Drainage published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Commission for Irrigation and Drainage

internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (Cirad)-Territoires, ressources, acteurs (Tera), Unité propre de recherche (UPR) Action collective, marchés et rénovations des politiques publiques et Institut d'économie rurale, Programme économie des filières,

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

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