Water Users Associations (WUAs) are all too often considered a panacea for improving water management in irrigation schemes. Where grassroots movements are absent, they are usually imposed on farmers by national governments, NGOs, and international donors, without fully considering existing forms of organization. This also happened in the Office du Niger irrigation scheme in Mali, where after a partial irrigation management transfer, WUAs were created to fill the resulting power vacuum. This paper demonstrates that, despite active efforts to organize farmers in WUAs, informal patterns of decision making remain dominant. Given the shortcomings of these informal patterns, WUAs could provide a much‐needed platform for institutionalizing collective action, on the condition that farmers accept them. Therefore WUAs should adopt some crucial characteristics of informal patterns of decision making while avoiding their weaknesses. First, making use of the existing authority of village leadership and the central management can improve the credibility of WUAs. Second, allowing flexibility in procedures and rules can make them more appropriate for dealing with collective action problems that are typically temporary and specific. Last, formalizing the current pattern of conflict management and sanctioning might enhance its sphere of action and tackle the current absence of firm engagement with respect to some informal management decisions. In addition, WUAs should represent and be accountable to all farmers, including those residing outside the village community.
We designed and implemented an action-research programme in large-scale irrigation schemes in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, aiming to develop a regional network of competences by conducting research, training and development activities, and involving local actors. We worked on three issues: (i) the sustainability of North Africa's growing groundwater economy, (ii) the integration of environmental constraints in the management of irrigated agriculture, and(iii) the analysis of new coordination modes of agricultural production and rural development in traditionally centrally managed irrigation schemes. Based on 11 empirical studies, we contributed to operationalizing a new praxis in irrigation management; this learning-oriented and network-based approach enables mobilization of the knowledge of a wide range of actors, as well as linking local knowledge systems to more universal ones. This approach is necessary to support family-based agriculture to continue to face recurrent droughts, feed the urban and rural populations, develop rural territories and integrate the rural youth.
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