Theme 4: Modernization of Irrigation Infrastructure and Management Services

Launching date: 24 September

Theme Co-ordinator: Thierry Facon, Water Management Officer, FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific

QUESTIONS

• The sustainability of the WUAs depends on their capacity to provide an adequate water delivery service, control and allocate water, and provide an improved service to enable gains in agricultural productivity. This is essential for the farmers to pay water and for the WUAs to be financially viable. Do the physical works implemented with IMT ensure adequate service now and in the future?
• Conjunctive use and recirculation are frequent but IMT often only concerns surface water systems and their management. What does it say about IMT? Is this a problem? What institutions could be created to adequately address all areas of water management? Is drainage sufficiently taken into account in IMT?
• Can one design systems taking into account human/institutional aspects and what would be the repercussion on the type of technology? How does one produce simple, transparent design and operational procedures?
• What are the tools and processes for decision-making in the level of service, in operational rules, in planning and design of rehabilitation works and how are the users involved? How is the decision on service related to financial decisions: service fees or farmers’ contributions to operation, maintenance or physical works? How is it related to plans to upgrade management capacity?
• How has IMT affected design processes and standards? Is this reflected in the restructuring of the agency?
• What is your experience with service agreements and what recommendations can you make?
• How to ensure that rehabilitation, modernization do not increase farmer dependence on the government? Should improvement works be done before or after transfer? What financing systems and modalities can be proposed?
• What are the indicators used in the monitoring and evaluation? Which are the most relevant? How to ensure an effective feedback from M&E to improve the transfer program?
• Does the knowledge exist on how to design and implement service-oriented water control and management? Do capacity building components address related knowledge gaps and what skills, resources, information, infrastructure, etc. are needed for agencies, WUAs and farmers to prepare and implement service agreements?

Stated vs. actual water management. Intended or stated water management of a system is often very different from actual water management. Service requirements of the farmers are often met from other sources than the intended delivery of the main surface systems. Yet, IMT programs often fail to take into account actual needs as expressed by farmers’ actual practices, or actual water management. New institutions appear to reflect stated operations and not the need for combined management of water delivery, drainage, water recycling and conjunctive use.

The actual systems. Initial concepts of extensive irrigation used for the development of irrigation were adapted to the conditions of unregulated supply and objectives of irrigation of the time. Later design standards to deliver water according to crop demand were more advanced but most of the systems fail to meet that objective. Agricultural performance has been affected by deficiencies in the water control technology or the complexity of operations. Managing actual systems is often a complex, difficult and sometimes impossible task, e.g. for systems designed for operation at full capacity.

How farmers responded and why they will always respond in the same manner. Farmers responded to economic changes, poor or inadequate service or insufficient flows for intensive irrigation and tried to achieve flexibility, reliability and volumes required for adoption of modern cultivation practices or freedom in cropping strategies through illegal water trading, tampering of control structures, tapping additional resources, pumping from canals, drains, borrow pits etc. The explosion of groundwater irrigation is largely a farmer response to the lack of flexibility and the unreliability of the canal systems. Managers also try to rectify management capacity and design shortcomings through recycling and conjunctive use. This is inevitable. Farmers subvert water distribution rules that define patterns that do not match their feasible and desired goals. Inconsistent rules will lead to inefficient and inequitable water distribution. Operations in the upper levels must improve for WUAs to develop applicable rules and procedures. Production objectives of the farmers must be incorporated at all levels. Responding to change requires adapting water distribution rules. Adoption of new on-farm technology requires improved operation of the main and conveyance systems.

Design processes have been a problem. Performance of irrigation projects is determined by physical, institutional and policy factors. Gaps between potential and actual outcome are often related to over-optimistic assumptions, to faulty designs and construction or to the capacity of the managers to apply operational rules defined by designers under real field conditions. Administrative and behavioural reasons such as lack of experience, accountability and feedback from operation of designers and lack of accountability of operators and managers to the users are to blame. In countries with large development of irrigation, state officials have entrenched engineering practices. One should review the design standards, configuration and operational procedures at the moment of transfer as a result of a resetting of internal objectives and externalities.

IMT corrects the root cause of the problem but not the existing infrastructure. IMT can correct institutional, administrative and behavioural problems but institutional measures cannot correct existing infrastructure. Irrigation projects now often take the form of sector loans or national/regional projects with participation and capacity building objectives and low cost rehabilitation or differed maintenance components. This cannot correct original design deficiencies, if the causes of deficiencies are not identified through an in-depth diagnosis of the current system. In practice, rehabilitation simply re-establishes the original physical configuration. The content and orientation of rehabilitation in IMT are critical in countries with ageing infrastructure. An appraisal of initial conditions and performance of the systems to be transferred would allow both a better design and strategic planning of physical improvements together with a definition of the service to be provided both by the irrigation service provider to WUAs and by WUAs to their members, with indications on ways and means to achieve these service goals and improve them in the future. Operation rules should be transparent and understood by the users.

Modern design processes. Modern design processes select the configuration and physical components in light of a well-defined, realistic operational plan based on the service concept and uses advanced hydraulic engineering, agronomy and social concepts to arrive at the most simple and workable solution. The most important issue is the system ability to achieve a specific level of operational performance at all levels within the system. A proper operational plan is the instrument that combines the various perspectives and reconciles expectations between users, project manager, field operators and the country policy objectives. The second step is the decisions about water deliveries i.e. the flexibility (frequency, rate and duration) at all levels. Flexibility distinguishes and characterizes classes of service quality from rotation to on-demand and is most closely related to improvements in agricultural performance, crop diversification, etc. Service agreements together with strategic management are increasingly adopted to encapsulate the iterative decision process on level of service and associated financial decisions, accountability, M&E as well as plans to upgrade management and infrastructure.

Design and degrees of freedom in distribution. Existing layout, original design criteria and standards used for an irrigation project limit the options for its rehabilitation and modernization. A rigid schedule of water deliveries may use modern irrigation hardware and computerized decision support systems to make water deliveries reliable and equitable, but a project designed for rotation or proportional distribution through simple non-adjustable structures cannot be operated for flexibility. In extensive irrigation projects, design capacity decreases from upstream to downstream while it increases to accommodate the need for flexibility in responsive irrigation projects.

IMT, Integrated water resources management, policy reform and design and operation. Water rights and the necessity to satisfy different water uses with the same primary infrastructure will also become a major issue, together with obligations related to disposal and quality of effluents and other environmental requirements. The contractual approach to bulk supply provision or irrigation service provision may require changes in hardware and operational rules at the interface with precise, but user-friendly, control of flows and measurements of volumes. If management of the main system has to be divided between units, the interface should be located at hydraulic "breakdowns" such as reservoirs. The design of irrigation projects should take the establishment of water rights and trade of these rights, and the pricing of water on a volumetric basis into consideration. The layout of the canal network should also be designed so as to be integrated with the multi-levels of management. Frequently, layers of operational responsibility replicate layers of governance. It is expected that farmers will operate large and complex systems. But the organization that governs an irrigation scheme does not have to also be the service provider.

Modernization. Modernization of an irrigation system is defined as the act of upgrading or improving the system capacity to enable it to respond appropriately to the water service demands of the current times, keeping in perspective future needs, or as a process of technical and managerial upgrading (as opposed to mere rehabilitation) of irrigation schemes with the objective to improve resource utilization (labor, water, economics, environmental) and water delivery service to farms. This involves institutional, organizational and technological changes and implies changes at all operational levels of irrigation schemes from water supply and conveyance to the farm level. The objective is to improve irrigation services to farmers and improvements in canal operation will generally be a critical first step in the process. Users have to take the final decisions on the modernization programmes: this assumes that transfer has taken place and that farmers are in a position to decide on the level of service they want and are willing to pay for and have an established water right as for them to invest in the long-term. IMT programs commonly include efforts to rehabilitate, upgrade or modify infrastructure. IMT entails changes in governance of the systems for goal setting, which includes the decision on the service to be provided by the system. Relevant to IMT would also be among others the determination or choice of cropping patterns (previously by the agency).

Field processes for planning rehabilitation and upgrading and their outputs in Asia . IMT processes are meant to be demand-driven. The most common tool for planning rehabilitation/improvement works is the walk-through. PRA mapping, transects, of land tenure, farming systems, ecosystems are also common. A diagnosis of operation procedures is usually not performed. Physical works are not related to service or performance goals. Expectations are low. The focus on upgrading is generally on reliability and equity, which are admittedly the first issues to be addressed but there is generally no vision of future requirements or discussion of flexibility. Impacts on agricultural performance are typically not noticeable. The necessity of reengineering irrigation for crop diversification and a more commercial orientation is emphasized, in apparent contrast however with actual processes. For the large systems, partial or gradual transfer by federation is a constraint to address strategic issues at the start of the process.

Gradual improvement strategies. PIM has generally led to modest efforts by farmers to improve management efficiency and responsiveness. Under-investment in O&M is observed. New programs therefore emphasize gradual on-going infrastructure improvements, with the objective to improve performance and ensure financial viability and physical sustainability of irrigation. Financial instruments that allow farmers to invest in the upgrading of their irrigation systems become critical. Decentralized irrigation improvement funds to provide matching funds from Government are increasing proposed in IMT programmes.

Other regions have often adopted a radically different approach. In contrast with this model, IMT in other regions has often taken a very different shape, with a deliberate effort to change the control logic of the systems from the top down and the transfer of large units of the systems to large water users associations. IMT has been more engineering driven. Associated issues are: whether basic flaws or constraints can be addressed with a light rehabilitation program and whether not doing so hampers IMT/PIM or jeopardizes the success of reform, whether impacts of IMT are proportional to the initial or targeted degree of performance in terms of water control, and whether possibilities to exert the authority to define service are related to the possibility to effectively control water and adopt diversified operational strategies.

New management requirements. One must understand the internal processes of irrigation systems, and enhance these, if project performance is to be improved. "Details" (such as communication, procedures etc.) are important: investments should be based around specific actions to improve them, rather than deciding on the framework for their improvement after the investment is approved. Management in a service oriented is also a complex operation and requires advanced managerial skills and the ability to process and interpret large amounts of data. Managers including WUA managers need modern information and management systems.

Monitoring and evaluation. As IMT modifies the organizational arrangements for providing the service, it must be evaluated in terms of the quality of that service. In current monitoring and evaluation systems, key issues about outcomes and impacts include as potential immediate outcomes the quality of the water delivery service. Possible impacts are related to socio-economics and productivity. Areas of interest for water users are quality and cost of O&M, use of funds collected, agricultural and economic productivity. Impacts include cropping intensity, number of crops grown, congruence of operational rules with farmers’ goals. M&E is meant to provide information but also to strengthen local management capacity, enhance skills and support problem solving by WUAs with tools like inspection of irrigation systems for planning of maintenance or rehabilitation priorities, preparation of O&M plans etc. In the service concept, these outcome and impact indicators are the specific objectives of service-oriented management.

External performance and internal process indicators and benchmarking. External performance indicators examine ratios of outputs and/or inputs such as economic output, efficiency, and relative water supply. Targets are set relative to management objectives, and indicators tell how well the system is performing relative to these targets. This is also useful to compare performance between two irrigation systems with similar characteristics i.e. for benchmarking, which could usefully be generalized in IMT projects. Internal process indicators assist managers to improve water delivery service to users. They include indicators to assess processes and concretely measure service at all levels and have an obvious role in M&E systems.

Irrigation management audits and asset management. Irrigation management audits are used to assess performance according to key indicators listed in a service agreement. Where infrastructure is still owned by the government after IMT, audits can be done jointly by the irrigation agency, WUA and local government to assess governance and technical, financial and organizational aspects of service provision. Prerequisites for management audits are a detailed initial assessment of assets and systematic monitoring of their condition and functionality.

Contact: imt-moderator@fao.org