Role of Community and Government in Irrigation Management in Emerging States: Lessons from Japan, China, and India

Abstract

The community has been used as a convenient institutional device for the mobilization of rural labor for successful irrigation management. The main message of this chapter is that the use of community is not a panacea, and government should also play an important role particularly in emerging states. An important issue in irrigation management in emerging states is how to achieve a smooth substitution of capital for labor under increasing labor scarcity in the agricultural sector. The community cannot properly achieve this substitution because externalities in irrigation services increase in a complicated manner when farmers exit from farming, and community mechanisms also decline. Lessons from Japan, China, and India are summarized threefold. First, as the externalities increase, the government should actively intervene at the right time to support the adoption of labor-saving technologies in irrigation management. Second, at the same time, however, we need to have some mechanism which can circumvent a political economy problem of excessive support following the trend for increasing agricultural protectionism during rapid industrialization. The experiences of the developed countries exemplify the difficulty of this task. Third, the government must take care of new issues which also need active government involvement: the depletion of groundwater and the introduction of volumetric irrigation water pricing. Since these new issues were not common among the DCs when they were at the similar stage of economic development, the governments of the contemporary emerging states need more administrative capacity than the governments of the DSs used to do for irrigation management.