Irrigation and agricultural development in Asia: Perspective from the social sciences

Thornton, D. S.

doi:10.1016/0309-586x(82)90049-8

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. [19]. Consequently, the control of water is tantamount to the control of society, a concept that has remained constant throughout human history [15,20].…”

Section: Competing Interestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The paradox of production: Surface water supply drives agricultural productivity but not prosperity in California’s San Joaquin Valley

Espinoza,

Viers

2024

PLOS Water

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Societies globally are struggling to meet freshwater demands while agencies attempt to address water access inequities under a rapidly changing climate and growing population. An understanding of dynamic interactions between people and water, known as sociohydrology, regionally could provide approaches to addressing local water mismanagement and water access inequity. In semi-arid California, local water agencies, primarily agricultural irrigation districts, are at the intersection of rethinking approaches to balance freshwater demands. More than 150 years of complex water governance and management have defined San Joaquin Valley irrigation districts and the region’s water access inequities and sociohydrologic instability. Older irrigation districts have higher surface water allocations and less groundwater dependence. About 60% of irrigation districts with pre-1914 water rights have twice the crop water demand in surface water allocations. In contrast, 86% of irrigation districts depend on groundwater, of which 12% rely exclusively on groundwater to supply irrigation demands. This study found that disadvantaged communities within irrigation districts do not have increased water access or better environmental conditions than those outside irrigation district boundaries, which underscores the need for inclusive water management structures to address the multifaceted water and environmental inequities. Groundwater overdependence across irrigation districts shows that imbalanced surface water allocations and inflexible crops could imperil agriculture and impact agricultural disadvantaged communities, especially under California’s SGMA and prolonged drought events. It is imperative that underserved communities are prioritized communities in achieving equitable water rebalance in California in addition to developing and implementing essential infrastructure and policy changes.

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Section: Competing Interestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The paradox of production: Surface water supply drives agricultural productivity but not prosperity in California’s San Joaquin Valley

Espinoza,

Viers

2024

PLOS Water

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“…These networks play a major role in sharing risks and coordination across large scales. Another notable case is that of the Subaks in the island of Bali in Indonesia (Geertz 1980), whose uniqueness derives from the underlying need to coordinate crop planting and harvesting dates because of the threat of pest outbreaks and water scarcity. This has led to the self-organization of yield-enhancing autonomous networks of water temples ) that help coordinate the actions of farmers at large scales without any centralized control.…”

Section: Notable Exceptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding how governance emerges in social-ecological systems: insights from archetype analysis

Aggarwal¹,

Anderies²

2023

E&S

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This paper is motivated by the question: how does governance emerge within social-ecological systems (SESs)? Addressing this question is critical for fostering sustainable transformations because it directs attention to the context specific and process intensive nature of governance as arising from the internal dynamics (i.e., interplay of feedbacks and interdependencies between the components) of SESs. This contrasts with the commonly held view of governance as an external intervention applied to a system. To systematically examine the recurrent patterns in how the internal dynamics promote/detract from the emergence of different types of governance, we applied archetype analysis to 60 selected cases of irrigation systems from Asia. Drawing inspiration from grid-group typology of cultural theory, we developed four specific archetypes: egalitarian, individualist, hierarchical, and fatalist. To build these archetypes, we applied a robustness framework and several other theories/perspectives to identify the different social-ecological and infrastructural attributes of irrigation SESs, and their interdependencies and feedback structures. We then used these attributes, identified through our theoretical review, to deductively code our selected cases and classify them into the different archetypes. The results show the different configurations of attributes that co-occur in each archetype, and how together these attributes and their inter-relationships lead to specific types of governance. Our archetype analysis also provides several interesting examples of fine-tuning between different SES attributes and how this fine-tuning is being threatened by various social and environmental changes. Through a systematic exploration of recurrent patterns using archetype analysis, our work builds on past efforts to apply ideas from complexity theory-specifically emergence-to unpack the complexities of SESs and offer practical guidance for fostering sustainability.

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“…Research on local collective action in irrigation has highlighted a variety of socio-technical relationships. Farmers have found a many ways to organize themselves and carry out functions such as construction, operation, maintenance, resource mobilization, and conflict resolution (Coward, 1980;Maass & Anderson, 1978;Mabry, 1996;Uphoff, 1986). For canal irrigation, the greatest potential for cooperation may exist at intermediate levels of scarcity, in an "inverse-U" shaped curve between abundance and severe scarcity (Uphoff et al, 1990).…”

Section: IIImentioning

confidence: 99%

Water User Associations and Collective Action in Irrigation and Drainage

Bruns¹

2023

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science

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If there is too little or too much water, farmers may be able to work together to control water and grow more food. Even before the rise of cities and states, people living in ancient settlements cooperated to create better growing conditions for useful plants and animals by diverting, retaining, or draining water. Local collective action by farmers continued to play a major role in managing water for agriculture, including in later times and places when rulers sometimes also organized construction of dams, dikes, and canals. Comparative research on long-lasting irrigation communities and local governance of natural resources has found immense diversity in management rules tailored to the variety of local conditions. Within this diversity, Elinor Ostrom identified shared principles of institutional design: clear social and physical boundaries; fit between rules and local conditions, including proportionality in sharing costs and benefits; user participation in modifying rules; monitoring by users or those accountable to them; graduated sanctions to enforce rules; low-cost conflict resolution; government tolerance or support for self-governance; and nested organizations. During the 19th and 20th centuries, centralized bureaucracies constructed many large irrigation schemes. Farmers were typically expected to handle local operation and maintenance and comply with centralized management. Postcolonial international development finance for irrigation and drainage systems usually flowed through national bureaucracies, strengthening top-down control of infrastructure and water management. Pilot projects in the 1970s in the Philippines and Sri Lanka inspired internationally funded efforts to promote participatory irrigation management in many countries. More ambitious reforms for transfer of irrigation management to water user associations (WUAs) drew on examples in Colombia, Mexico, Turkey, and elsewhere. These reforms have shown the feasibility in some cases of changing policies and practices to involve irrigators more closely in decisions about design, construction, and some aspects of operation and maintenance, including cooperation in scheme-level co-management. However, WUAs and associated institutional reforms are clearly not panaceas and have diverse results depending on context and on contingencies of implementation. Areas of mixed or limited impact and for potential improvement include performance in delivering water; maintaining infrastructure; mobilizing local resources; sustaining organizations after project interventions; and enhancing social inclusion and equity in terms of multiple uses of water, gender, age, ethnicity, poverty, land tenure, and other social differences. Cooperation in managing water for agriculture can contribute to coping with present and future challenges, including growing more food to meet rising demand; competition for water between agriculture, industry, cities, and the environment; increasing drought, flood, and temperatures due to climate change; social and economic shifts in rural areas, including outmigration and diversification of livelihoods; and the pursuit of environmental sustainability.

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Irrigation and agricultural development in Asia: Perspective from the social sciences

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

The paradox of production: Surface water supply drives agricultural productivity but not prosperity in California’s San Joaquin Valley

The paradox of production: Surface water supply drives agricultural productivity but not prosperity in California’s San Joaquin Valley

Understanding how governance emerges in social-ecological systems: insights from archetype analysis

Water User Associations and Collective Action in Irrigation and Drainage

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