The success of a policy model: Irrigation management transfer in Mexico

Abstract

The Mexican policy of Irrigation Management Transfer has been widely propagated as a success and has become a model for other countries seeking to improve the performance of their irrigation systems while also cutting public expenditures. This article analyses the process of policy-making that has generated the policy model and follows the practices, means, and events through which it has achieved increasing transnational circulation, popularity, and support. The main argument of this article is that the success of a policy model is only a success within the cultural and ideological understandings of a policy network and given the means, practices, and events that generate and disseminate it. This particular case further suggests that success in policy-making, rather than being based on straightforward evidence of improved management performance, is often part of a cultural performance.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express his thanks to Jan-Kees van Donge, Flip Wester, and Jens Andersson for commenting upon draft versions of this article. David Mosse and an anonymous reviewer are thanked for their very useful suggestions. The author also gratefully acknowledges the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO), the Department of Rural Development Sociology, Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR), and International Development Studies (IDS) of Roskilde University, Denmark for supporting this research.

Notes

1. Throughout the text, Spanish words are italicised and Mexican acronyms and abbreviations are used.

2. Of the 5.2 million hectares of Mexico's irrigated land, 3.2 million hectares are organised in 80 irrigation districts, varying in size from a few thousand to systems of more than 200,000 hectares in the north of the country. The rest is organised in privately or collectively run small-scale systems called irrigation units. Most of the irrigation systems are gravity-based, with water being derived from storage reservoirs by means of diversion dams and conveyance canals. At the end of 1994, the CNA had transferred 36 districts completely and 18 partially (Gorriz et al., 1995).

3. In this article the term ‘success’ is used so frequently, that using quotation marks every single time would be irritating. The reader is kindly requested to imagine them every time the term is used and not to take its meaning for granted.

4. An epistemic community is ‘a network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain’ (Haas, 1992: 3).

5. For other uses of the concept of policy network see: Teichman (1995), Sutton (1999).

6. Other objectives that are mentioned are to reduce the number of public employees in the irrigation districts (Johnson, 1997b), and the participation of water users in irrigation management through financially autonomous and administratively independent bodies (Poder-Ejecutivo-Federal, 1989: 77).

7. Ejidos are land reform communities that form a significant part of the surface of Mexican irrigation districts. They are represented in the WUA's elected assemblies and continue to play a role in rural politics.

8. Based on interviews with ex-CNA officials in the summer of 1999.

9. Elsewhere I show that financial self-sufficiency of a WUA does not automatically imply either the infrastructural viability of a module (Palacios-Vélez, 1997; Kloezen, 2002) or accountability towards water users (Rap, 2004).

10. This appears from a contribution of Dr Trava in the electronic forum on IMT of the FAO (September 2001): ‘I think we have spent a lot of time talking about the different ways to approach IMT (or PIM) or to develop the needed actions to make the program successful but in the meanwhile we have lost some perspective on what the overall idea is all about. The overall and basic idea in the end is to achieve a productive (socially and economically speaking) agricultural sector’.

11. A constant set of objectives is often lacking in the literature. Vermillion and Sagardoy (1999) consider management transfer to be successful if it saves government money, improves the cost-efficiency of O&M, and maintains or increases the productivity of irrigated agriculture, and achieves financial and infrastructural sustainability. A few years later, Vermillion is much more cautious in formulating objectives: attempting to reduce expenditures on irrigation, stabilising infrastructural deterioration without sacrificing the productivity (Vermillion, 2004). The objectives thus shift over time to keep success within hand, in spite of reduced expectations.

12. The CNA came under the jurisdiction of the SARH from 1989 – 94. Since 1994 it has come under the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources and Fisheries.

13. This term is a contraction of hydraulic bureaucrats or technocrats and is used here to refer to engineers working in water bureaucracies, see Mollinga and Bolding 2004.

14. The World Bank intended to experiment with a time-slice loan financing a government's full irrigation, drainage and flood control sector programme for a specified number of years. For the World Bank this was an important innovation compared to traditional project loans, as it provided more scope for policy dialogue and made it possible to reassess investment priorities and redirect financial flows.

15. In the national (Mexico City-based) press there was a striking lack of coverage of the transfer. This contrasted with the lively political debates in the media on the drastic legal reforms concerning the ownership of land (Article 27 of the Constitution). Very few independent academic sources or media discussed the transfer in public. Those in academic and research institutions that held more informed views of what was happening in the field were often bureaucratically or ideologically tied to the CNA.

16. The often unanswered empirical question here is to what extent they worked to achieve a certain policy objective.

17. EDI provides most external training for the World Bank on high priority policy issues.

18. I thank Jan-Kees van Donge for sharing this observation with me.

19. Until recently, it was forbidden by Mexican law to refuse water to a crop that received a first irrigation turn. Several WUAs have now sidestepped the problem of fee default through financial agreements with subsidy providers and agri-industry, to the effect that these investors in irrigated agriculture advance the irrigation fees for their clients. This ensures improved cost recovery, but only concerns those users that receive subsidies or produce for agri-industry.

20. On several occasions these officials have warned against exaggerated expectations from replicating the Mexican model in other parts of the world and point to the specific conditions in which the policy worked in Mexico. Notwithstanding this, the policy network persisted in asking them to explain the Mexican model at policy conferences.

21. Between 1990 and 1994 the CNA transferred nearly 2.5 million hectares, roughly three-quarters of the total irrigated surface in Mexico (CNA 1994). See also the section on the visualisation of the model below.

22. For an exception, see Vos 2002. I thank Alex Bolding for his suggestions regarding this issue.

23. In reality, CNA wholesales water to WUAs on the basis of volumetric measuring. Water pricing takes place in the institutional and political force field between the CNA and the WUAs, and the subsequent water delivery to users is done by the WUAs. These factors co-determine the price and efficiency of water distribution.

24. It is a similar process as Stirrat (2001) analyses in relation to consultancy.

25. Water guards, who are responsible for the water distribution.