The limits to participation: branch-canal water user associations in the Egyptian Delta

ABSTRACT

Egypt has valuable experience with water user associations in irrigated agriculture. Internationally funded irrigation improvement projects aiming to increase irrigation efficiency have introduced water user associations at the branch-canal level alongside improvements to the infrastructure in the Central Delta of Egypt. In this article we review those water management practices in which these associations are expected to participate. Our main finding is that their role in these areas is minimal and that they are generally weak organizations. Either such organizations should be genuinely strengthened legally and politically, and given real responsibilities and resources, or the entire idea of participation should be abandoned.

KEYWORDS:

• Participation
• participatory irrigation management (PIM)
• irrigation management transfer (IMT)
• water user associations (WUAs)
• conflict resolution
• water conflicts
• Egypt

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Hunt (1989) later observed that such ideas about WUAs were based on a weak analogy with irrigation communities, which have a clear charter of authority and a leadership that is accountable to farmers.

2. Baffle regulators at the head of the BC allow managers to determine and fix the discharge, later completed with ‘downstream control regulation’, that is, automatic gates that react to a drop in water level in the BC due to farmersʼ abstraction by opening to allow more water in. The idea was to reduce the need to over-abstract at the canal head by ensuring continuous water availability.

3. ‘Sector’ implies that it became a separate vertical tier under the ministry, and ‘national project’ gave the project a mandatory character, which deemed its activities of national interest and security.

4. The ‘improvement’ label promotes the normative view that project interventions are indeed improvements, which implicitly legitimizes their imposition and deems farmers’ responses to adapt or refuse such interventions irrational. Hence, the reader should take care with this label. In forthcoming publications we will elaborate this point.

5. Individuals have been kept anonymous.

6. Water Boards Project (1999–2006); Water Stability Project (2005–2009); Water Management Improvement Project (2000–2007); LIFE (2000–2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research.