Formal and informal decision making on water management at the village level: A case study from the Office du Niger irrigation scheme (Mali)

Abstract

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.

Water user associations: a review of approaches and alternative management options for Sub-Saharan Africa

“…Under these conditions, the public sector placed more responsibilities on irrigation water users (Aw and Diemer 2005;Wester et al 1995). The often abrupt disengagement of public irrigation agencies contributed to improper O&M of the irrigation systems by WUAs (Vandersypen et al 2007;Wellens et al 2013).…”

“…After independence, African national governments built large-scale irrigation systems 4 or took over the management of existing systems from colonial authorities (Carpenter et al 2017;Oates et al 2015;Vandersypen et al 2007). International development banks and bilateral agencies provided grants and loans to African governments to rehabilitate or extend systems in the post-colonial era.…”

Contribution of an innovation platform to change the management of collective irrigation: a case study from the Office du Niger (Mali)

“…There were two options to resolve this institutional dilemma: allowing those who wished to absent themselves to pay for hiring labourers in their place; and for the ON, to resume responsibility for cleaning the tertiary canals, with farmers making a cost-sharing contribution in the form of a levy to be included in the water fee. Although these suggestions had been proposed already by previous research (Vandersypen et al, 2007;Passouant et al, 2010), little change had resulted. In our case, the TGPI data allowed us to track what happened in consequence, as presented in the next two sections.…”

“…That was stipulated in the first Contrat Plan in 1994. It was assumed that the Plan expressed everyone's interests, but performance did not significantly improve, because of a lack of incentive measures to bring about the desired collective action on the part of tenants (Vandersypen et al, 2007;Vandersypen et al, 2009).…”

Making Science Useful to Decision Makers: Climate Forecasts, Water Management, and Knowledge Networks

“…They often interpret uncertainty as unreliability-one symptom of their reliance upon heuristics. Also, water managers are used to dealing with water variability without climate forecasts; they have their own routines and are much more likely to trust information with which they are familiar (Knopman 2006;Vandersypen et al 2007). Experience with climate forecasts is recent and therefore less trusted.…”