Study On Participatory Irrigation Management Mechanism Of Farmers In Tongdong Irrigation District Of Guizhou

With the deepening of reforms in China in recent years,economic development in rural area has been improving steadily,however,the imbalance between supply and demand of agricultural water is increasingly obvious due to imperfect management mechanism.As a typical public service facility,agricultural irrigation system is not only closely related to farmers’ lives,but also vital to guarantee agricultural production.In China,most of existing agricultural irrigation facilities were constructed between the1950 s and the 1970 s,and many facilities had already been aged and seriously damaged after long-term operation.Confronted with the severe situation of increasingly obvious water resource crisis in recent years and problems including much waste of water for agricultural irrigation and deterioration of ecological environment,how to strengthen the effective management of agricultural water resources and its affiliated engineering facilities has become an urgent problem to be solved in the sustainable development of agricultural economy.Guided by the government failure theory and Elinor Ostrom’s theory of autonomous management of public pond resources,historical changes of the irrigation management mechanism in east Tongren irrigation district are generally concluded into three phases since foundation of new China,on the basis of analyzing existing literature related to irrigation management mechanism.The first phase is the boom of constructing water conservancy projects during the early days of new China,due to the disassembly of people’s communes,dispersive farmers lost reliance on the organization and centralized irrigation management ended in failure.Until the early 1980 s when the household responsibility system started to be implemented in the rural area,the government stopped to allocate water resource to collective agricultural economicorganizations in a planned way,but supplied to farmers,resulting great increase in transaction expenses and costs of supervision and management.In addition,due to the shift of the government’s constructing emphasis and significant reduce of investments into water conservancy,the irrigation work stayed stagnant for a decade.In the early1990 s,funded by the World Bank,China started to introduce in the mechanism of“participatory irrigation management”(PIM),the main content of which was to organize water users associations(WUAs)with the nature of civil organization.At the call of the government,relevant management departments of east Tongren irrigation district started to encourage farmers to establish WUAs from 2000.Seen from achievements of operation practices of WUAs in east Tongren irrigation district,the reform of the PIM solves the long-term absence of “subject” for water conservancy management in rural area.However,sustainable development of WUAs is still confronted with various difficulties.To investigate the reasons,empirical investigations are carried out with the current PIM in east Tongren irrigation district as the object for case study.By observing and visiting farmers’ willingness for self-involved participatory management and learning about the establishing procedure of WUAs in east Tongren irrigation distric,problems of the existing management mechanism are unveiled through analysis and assessment on the specific contents.For this problems,suggestions are put forward to provide certain basis for basic-level government to resolve water shortage in rural area and low management efficiency,and avoid unnecessary waste of water resource.