Irrigation reform in Asia a review of 108 cases of irrigation management transfer

Like the proverbial happy families of Tolstoy, it is thought that all successful water users associations (WUA’s) have intrinsic commonalities and once these are understood, WUAs can be engineered for success. A large body of literature has been devoted to understanding the factors that make or break cooperative strategies in the field of natural resources management (NRM) in general and WUA’s in particular. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this body of literature by contesting the view that successful WUAs can be engineered. We argue that successful cooperative action in large scale public irrigation systems takes place under a set of very context specific and process intensive conditions – conditions that are difficult and costly, if not impossible to replicate elsewhere. We also argue that lack of replicability of successful cases of IMT is not an issue of poor implementation or enabling conditions , as it is generally thought (FAO, 2007), but is related to conceptual weakness of the IMT model itself.