From the 1980s onward, billions of dollars were poured into irrigation improvement programs in Egypt. These aimed at improving local Nile water management through the introduction of more water-efficient technology and by placing management of the improved systems in the hands of local water user associations. The central premise of most of these programs was that the functioning of such associations could rely on the revival of traditional forms of social capital—social networks, norms, and trust—for their success. This book shows how the far-reaching social changes wrought at the village level in Egypt through the twentieth century rendered such a premise implausible at best and invalid at worst. The book examines networks of social relationships and their impact on the exercise of social control and the formation of collective action at the local level and their change over time in four villages in the Delta and Fayoum governorates. Outlining three time frames, pre-1952, 1952–73, and 1973 to the present, and moving between multiple actors—farmers, government officials, and donor agencies—the book shows how institutional and technological changes during each period and the social changes that coincided with them yielded mixed successes for the water user associations in respect of water management.

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This chapter outlines the general conclusions of the research and the book based on the analysis of the four case study areas in Egypt. It also provides the basis for thoughts about a more realistic and critical consideration of social capital theories into the mainstream of community-based natural resource management in general, and irrigation management transfer in particular. The research undertaken for this book show that it was worthwhile to develop a comprehensive conceptual framework for the analysis of social capital to use in place of Putnam's theory and approach, which romanticize traditional village organizations and cannot satisfactorily explain the complexity observed in the case study areas. The findings also provided key lessons to keep in mind when establishing and supporting water users' associations (WUA) at the level of tertiary and branch canals. Among these are the impact of improvements to irrigation infrastructure on farmers' behavior and the functioning of WUAs on the tertiary canal, namely that reducing face-to-face interactions reduces the creation of social capital, social control, and collective action; and that cooperation is not only dependent on the availability of water but is also affected by the autonomy of the irrigation water management field and the assignment of water rights.

This chapter identifies and describes the conditions of the village and institutional fields since the 1970s in the case study areas in Kafr al-Sheikh (KSH) and Fayoum, which were influenced by the socioeconomic, institutional, and technological changes discussed in the literature. It examines the impact of these changes on the village field interactions, and thus the formation of collective action and the exercise of social control, and the extent to which these changes affected the irrigation water management (IWM) field. This chapter is divided into two sections. The first examines the changes that have affected the village field actors and their ability to exercise the social capital functions, social control and collective action, as well as changes to the main social relationships in the village field. The second analyzes the formation and functioning of water users' organizations in KSH and Fayoum on the mesqa and branch canal levels. It considers the impact of changes on the autonomy of the IWM field and the extent to which the village field influences irrigation water management in both governorates.