Brief description of documents
     
    Title Participatory irrigation management in Indonesia: Lessons from experience and issues for the future.
Background paper prepared for the Economic Development Institute, World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO.
Indonesia National Workshop on Participatory Irrigation Management, November 4-8, 1996.
(39 pages)
         
    Author   Bryan Bruns and Helmi
         
    Organisation   Economic Development Institute, now part of the World Bank Institute.
         
    Year   1996
         
    Summary/
Introduction		        Beginning in the 1980s there was an increased emphasis on improving participation and irrigation operation and maintenance in Indonesia. This paper looks at what has been learned about participatory irrigation management (PIM), focusing particularly on lessons from: 1) turnover of irrigation systems smaller than 500 hectares to water user associations (WUA), 2) establishment of irrigation service fees with WUA participation in fee collection and identification of operation and maintenance (O&M) needs and 3) development of irrigated agriculture by farmers in the On-Farm Water Management Development Project.

     The most important challenges lie in sustaining participation in irrigation management, in ways which improve irrigation performance and farmer welfare. Formal, bureaucratically organized WUA often quickly become inactive. Participatory programs have helped to improve water distribution and system maintenance, but these impacts have been inadequately emphasized. In ISF and turned-over systems, annual joint walkthroughs to review performance and plan future work could provide an incentive and stimulus essential to sustaining participatory irrigation management.

     A number of key lessons can be extracted from the experience of participatory programs:

  1. Participation improves planning, helping to provide valuable local information, prevent problems and optimize use of local resources.
  2. Local cost sharing increases benefits, both by mobilizing additional resources and by increasing accountability to farmers, which then helps improve the quality and appropriateness of construction.
  3. Institutional reforms promoted by participatory programs, such as irrigation service fee (ISF) and turnover, have helped highlight problems and support changes, such as more equitable block-level water distribution.
  4. Training programs have helped improve capacity to carry out participatory programs. Training should continue to help orient staff taking up new responsibilities. Monitoring information and WUA requests could aid in more efficiently targeting training at sites with priority problems and opportunities.
  5. A legal framework has been established for WUA. This framework will be more useful if it allows WUA to take on formal legal status when they need it.
  6. Policies now support participation, with detailed regulations, guidelines and training materials available.
  7. There has been a tendency to make participatory approaches excessively complicated. Simpler, more focused approaches to PIM are likely to be more effective.

     Several issues affect the potential for further improving participation in irrigation management.

  1. Agricultural diversification is needed to improve farmer incomes and welfare. If irrigated agriculture is more profitable for farmers then they will be more interested in irrigation management.
  2. Clearer water rights and farmer participation in basin water resources management could help prevent problems and facilitate smoother, more equitable and more efficient processes to improve water use efficiency and reallocate water among competing users.
  3. The capacity and sustainability of WUA may be strengthened through joint activities beyond irrigation management, building on local business opportunities.
  4. More traditional, quasi-voluntary WUA management can work well in small systems, while contracting for specialized irrigation management may be more suitable in multi-village irrigation systems and more commercialized areas.
  5. The financial capacity of WUA could be increased, enabling WUA to borrow and invest in irrigation development.
  6. Accumulated experience provides a basis for reengineering irrigation O&M to create better patterns for cooperation between government and farmers in the key process of equitably delivering irrigation water. Reengineering O&M could include opportunities for WUA to take over a greater role in the management of larger irrigation systems.
         
       

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