The past decade has witnessed an intensifying focus on the development of irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa. It follows a 20-year hiatus in the wake of disappointing irrigation performance during the 1970s and 1980s. Persistent low productivity in African agriculture and vulnerability of African food supplies to increasing instability in international commodity markets are driving pan-African agricultural investment initiatives, such as the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP), that identify as a priority the improvement in reliability of water control for agriculture. The paper argues that, for such initiatives to be effective, there needs to be a re-appraisal of current dynamics of irrigation development in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly with respect to the role of small-scale producers' initiatives in expanding irrigation. The paper reviews the principal forms such initiatives take and argues that official narratives and statistics on African irrigation often underestimate the extent of such activities. The paper identifies five key characteristics which, it argues, contradict widely held assumptions that inform irrigation policy in Africa. The paper concludes by offering a definition of 'farmer-led irrigation' that embraces a range of interaction between producers and commercial, government and nongovernment agencies, and identifies priority areas for research on the growth potential and impact of such interactions and strategies for their future development.

More details/abstract: The contestation and appropriation of water is not new, but recent global debates on land grabbing are bringing increased attention to a water perspective in these discussions. Water grabbing takes place in a field that is plural-legal, both locally and globally. Formal law has been fostering grabs, both in land and water. Meanwhile, today's formal water and land management have been separated from each other -an institutional void that makes encroachment even easier. Ambiguous processes of global water and land governance have increased local level uncertainties and complexities. Powerful players can navigate their ways through such uncertainties, making them into mechanisms of exclusion for poor and marginalised people. As in formal land management, corporate influence has grown in water management. For less powerful players, resolving ambiguities in conflicting regulatory frameworks may require tipping the balance in favour of the most congenial one. Yet compared to land governance, global water governance is today relatively less contested from an equity and water justice perspective, even though land is fixed, while water is fluid and part of the hydrological cycle -and therefore water grabbing potentially affects greater numbers of diverse water users. Water grabbing can be a powerful entry point for contestation, which is needed to build counterweights to the neoliberal corporate business led convergence in global resource governance discourses and processes. Elaborating a human right to water in response to water grabbing is urgently needed. Version: Submitted version (Author's Original Manuscript) IntroductionThe contestation and appropriation of water is not new, but in the contemporary context of a convergence of changing global dynamics around food, climate, energy, and finance, and the resulting global debates on land grabbing, there is renewed interest in a water perspective on resources grabs.1 Increasing attention to water has the potential to (re)invigorate inquiry and action along two lines simultaneously: 1. by casting new light on the global land grab phenomenon itself and related issues of land governance, while, 2. opening up new windows on old questions of political control, social justice and environmental sustainability in relation to use and management of water. Since about 2010 evidence has been growing that the rush to control water resources is an important cause, as well as effect, of the phenomenon now commonly known as land grabbing. Specific attention to water grabbing has been prompted by the observation that while land grabbing has received a lot of attention, 'water as both a target and driver of this phenomenon has been largely ignored despite the interconnectedness of water and land'.

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The establishment of the Bwanje Valley Irrigation Scheme (BVIS) in Malawi is a striking example of informed amnesia in development assistance. Despite the lessons learned earlier concerning a process approach to participatory irrigation development in Africa, in the case of BVIS outside interveners designed an irrigation system and parachuted it into Bwanje Valley as a black-boxed technology. Using a sociotechnical approach, this article analyses the travails of this irrigation scheme, showing that the conventional irrigation factory mindset is ill-suited for creating durable water networks. Achieving tangible improvements in rural livelihoods is better served by the interactive prototyping of water networks in situ, ensuring that new irrigation schemes are embedded in existing landscapes and complementary to existing livelihood strategies rather than supplanting them.