Managing Irrigation Water
Attributes
Medium: Water
Country: China
Analytical Framework(s): Other
Study Date: 2010
Publication Date: 2010
Major Result(s)
Study Note: Community governance theory of common pool resource predicts that user groups with close connections can manage the resource well if all the users are given the rights to manage it. Hence, there is a need to know whether social capital is effective and how the quality of local government affects the performance of the WUAs,in China. The overall goal of this research was to empirically analyze how the institutional arrangements and water users' participation behaviors in WUAs varied with levels ofsocial capital and the quality of local government. In the research, water users' characteristics and the availability of other water sources such as rainfall were controlled.
Study Details
Summary: Shortage in irrigation water has become a serious problem in rural China. Governments are trying to build more Water User Associations (WUAs) to improve the management of irrigation water. Better management would reduce the agricultural use of water and allocate more water to protect the environment, especially in arid and semi-arid areas where the ecological environment is very fragile. Therefore, it is important to know how WUAs have been organized, whether they have had contributions to water management, as well as how satisfied water users are. This report is among the first to characterize the situation of WUAs in northwest China. This report has three contributions. First, the report shows a relatively poor implementation of the reform to transfer management to WUAs in China. Many of the villagers did not even know that WUAs existed. The poor implementation of the reform program implies that water users were not officially entitled to the rights to manage these resources. Second, the report shows that the quality of local government was the main determinant of users' awareness on the existence of WUAs. This result implies that a more responsible government is needed to improve the efforts in implementing the reform or/and in transferring power to water users. Moreover, the awareness of users about the WUAs and the quality of government both had positive effects on the performance of WUAs. These combined facts suggest that a more responsible local government not only has direct positive contribution to the performance of WUAs, but that it also affects performance by increasing awareness among community members. Third, the coefficients of social capital and/or that of the interaction terms of social capital and awareness were significant in many of the regression models on the performance of WUAs and on the satisfaction of water users. The results suggest that social capital could affect the performance of WUAs. Considering that the coefficients of trust aggregated at the administrative village level were not significant in all the models, we can conclude that only the trust in the densely-connected community could be useful for community management. This result suggests that defining the boundary of common pool resources at the natural village level is very important for social capital to be effective.
Site Characteristics: This project made a cross-sectional analysis based on household surveys done in Gansu province in northwest China. Gansu province was chosen as the research area because of three reasons. First, the province is one of the first provinces transforming the traditional management scheme to WUAs. The province began implementing the reform on water management since 2001 to combat water shortage. News or government reports show that the reform has achieved significant success.Second, the province is one of the districts that experiences great shortage in irrigation water. The rainfall available for agricultural use is very scarce: the perennial average rainfall ranges from 100 mm to 250 mm, while the perennial average evaporation ranges from 1, 600 mm to 2, 600 mm.Shortage in water imposes significant constraint on the economic development of the province. As of now, the province is one of the less developed in the 31 provinces of China. With an annual GDP per capita in 2009 of 12,882 Chinese Yuan (approximately 1,886 USD with an exchange rate of 6.83:1), it ranked 30thamong the 31 province-level regions in mainland China.Third, the environment in the province is very vulnerable and sensitive to water use. For example, the Minqin Oasis at the end of Shiyang River in the province can change into a desert if there is not enough water supplemented to Shiyang River. The field work for this research was conducted in the three river basins in Gansu province, Northwest China. The three rivers were the Yellow, Shiyang, and Heihe; the latter two are inner continental rivers. In most regions, traditional flood irrigation is still the irrigation technology, but surface water and underground water are also being used in other areas.
Comments: The research faced some challenges. First, the unavailability of the exact amount of households' water use because of the lack of meters made the estimation of efficient water use impossible. Second, the reasons why the local government did not introduce WUAs to villagers need to be carefully studied. The possibilities include officials having no incentives to transfer the power of water management to users, or they believing that WUAs were not useful. Third, the identification of social capital remains a challenge, particularly in finding good measures for social capital.