Management and efficient utilisation of the irrigation has remained a contested topic of discussion since long and has been put to various tests and research across the globe. This has been obvious given the crucial role played by irrigation in maintaining the world food security in the light of increased water scarcity
(Mancosu et al., 2015; Joy et al., 2021; Kumar et al., 2023; Rede et al., 2025). One such effort to improve the irrigation sector had been introduced way back in the 1970s across the globe with the citizenry centered management of Irrigation. It was believed that the users themselves could be the best managers of irrigation if facilitated with proper training and awareness. This emerged from a global dissatisfaction with the traditionally managed irrigation systems that failed to bring desired results both in terms of quality and quantity of irrigation supply (
Facon, 2002; Aarnoudse
et
al., 2018). This effort came to be known variably as Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM) and Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) and its introduction varied far and wide from Mexico to India to Africa, Australia, Indonesia, Japan and Philippines to name a few (
Meinzen-Dick, 1997;
Poddar et al., 2011).
With the PIM in practice for about half a century now in various degrees and forms across the world, varied works have been taken up ranging from descriptive ones promoting the practice as testimonials from the reports of the donor agencies, working papers and government and non-governmental organisational reports to the quantitative ones attempting to statistically comprehend the impact of this practice
(Geijer et al., 1996; Vermillion, 1991;
Restrepo et al., 2007). The papers have been from all quarters of the world and have been present in all decades but none have been able to provide a clear picture of the outcome of this paradigm shift. While some have reported a positive impact of PIM (
Facon, 2002;
Uysal and Altis, 2010;
Jadeja and Parmar, 2017), there have been reports of negative impact too (
Facon, 2002;
Ghosh et al., 2008; Hussain, 2021) while there also have been inconclusive studies (
Samad and Vermillion, 1999).
Taking hint from the previous studies, this work tries to highlight the nature, extent and impact and PIM by systematically reviewing the available literature. The study follows the framework provided by Senanayake
et al. (2015) in assessing the global PIM practice over the years. Their work is one of the most robust ones on literature review to understand PIM and its impact
(Cambaza et al., 2020). In this attempt, it clubs the studies from 51 scholarly articles from across the nations and time periods to understand the practice of PIM. It unveils the temporal and spatial trend of the existing works and focuses how the interest of the researchers on PIM has undergone shift over the years.
The present study was conducted in the summer of 2024 in the advanced research centre of the Department of Geography in the Lady Brabourne College, University of Calcutta. To understand the nature and impact of the PIM from the existing body of literature, a systematic review has been conducted. The work aims to bring out a universal view of the evolution and assessment of the PIM across varied socio-temporal frames by commissioning common codes and assessment criteria for the wide array of the papers. In this attempt the regional/local studies have been put to test in a larger and a more uniform global context
(Senanayake et al., 2015).
The search
Relevant publications from the academic data bases like Semantic Scholar, Science Direct, Web of science, Elsevier, Sage Journals, FAO reports, IWMI reports, Scopus, Research Gate, World Bank publications and search engines like Google Scholar were searched. The search was based on the following search words- “Participatory Irrigation Management”, “Impact” or “outcome” or “analysis” plus “PIM”, “evolution” “growth” or advancement of PIM, “resource management” “common pool resources” “Problems of traditional irrigation” “PIM in India”. Apart from the ‘white’ literature from various journals, articles and books, the study also includes ‘grey’ literature from donor/ World Bank reports, working papers, theses and research reports.
The inclusion
The criteria for selection of relevant articles/ journals/ publications included- a) Original Publications b) full text articles c) published from 1980 onwards d) published in English e) included inputs on either 1.PIM as a concept and/or 2. Its evolution and/or 3.factors affecting PIM and/or 4. impact of PIM f) assessed the performance of PIM statistically g) has reviewed literatures on PIM. The criteria for exclusion of articles include- a) articles lacking relevance b) articles with variables which did not suit the selection criteria
c) articles with limited presentation of findings. The flow chart indicating the selection criteria for articles has been listed under (Fig 1).
A total of 350 publications had been identified through database search. Out of these 308 remained after screening of duplicates; of which 164 titles were excluded after screening of abstract and 144 full text publications were selected. Of these, 51 have been selected for the study. From amongst the 51, 37 relate to conceptualization, 28 to relate problems of state managed irrigation and the rise of PIM, 8 relate to the sustainability analysis of PIM and 16 relate to the impact assessment of PIM.
The temporal trend
The study begins with the 80s decade as the PIM practice gained momentum in 1970s reaching its peak in the 90s (
Meinzen-Dick, 1997;
Cambaza et al., 2020). The trend shows that the frequency of publication was highest in the decade of 2010s while it was minimum in the 1980s. The trend has been rising over the years with a decline in the current decade. While the rising trend may be attributed to the increased research interest in the PIM practice over the years, the falling trend may be explained by only a short span of publication in the current decade spanning only for four years till now.
Thematic preference over the years
The thematic preference of the scholarly works considered for the study has also been evaluated. For this, coding was done to identify the major ideas present in the papers. The codes included: conceptualisation/ idea of PIM, glitches of traditional irrigation management, Improvement of PIM over traditional irrigation, factors leading to evolution of PIM, Nature of PIM across the world/ countries/ regions, Policy interventions by governments/ non-governmental organisations/ donor agencies/ World Bank, Impact Analysis of PIM, Institutional Features related to PIM, failure or success analysis. Then the papers were arranged according to their decade of Publication and the major thrust of each paper was identified.
Table 1 shows that each decade had a major theme. In the 80s decade when the PIM had just started taking roots, the major part of the papers revolved around the concepts of the community based resource management (
Banki, 1981;
Uphoff, 1986). This seeped further into the analysis of the process in the next decade with more preference for participant led irrigation management over the centralized traditional irrigation system (
Vermillion, 1991;
Mitra, 1992;
Samad and Vermillion, 1999). In the next decade works of
Facon (2002),
Restrepo et al. (2007),
Gandhi and Namboodiri (2008), have focused mainly on the factors that led to the rise and popularity of PIM by focusing on the failure of the traditional irrigation systems. The next decade with the highest frequency of publications stuck to similar scope of study with a little more thrust on the impact of donors on the working of PIM (
Kulkarni and Tyagi, 2012;
Aarnoudse et al., 2018). The current decade has seen more focus on the impact analysis of PIM on the crop and water related outcomes and this trend can be traced from the later years of the 2010s decade. As evidenced from the works of works of
Jadeja and Parmer (2017),
Aarnoudse et al. (2018), in the decade of 2010s and in the works of
Ahmed et al. (2020),
Nyam et al. (2020),
Hussain et al. (2021), in 2020s have focused on the impact analysis of PIM. On the whole, though few major themes have been enlisted decade wise yet these are not mutually exclusive and there is considerable amount of overlap in the themes across decades.
Spatiality of the study
The spatial analysis shows that most of the works considered have been from India followed by Africa and Thailand (Table 2). While two of the works have been based on Pakistan and Asia, papers from China, Turkey, USA, Japan, Sri Lanka and Kyrgyzstan have also been studied. The total spatial count for the papers stands at 32 out of the total 51. This is because few papers are based on review of literature and on the policy intervention across nations
(Restrepo et al., 2007), which makes the identification of specific regions difficult in such papers.
The factors leading to the rise of PIM
The varied list of factors as identified by the papers and scholars has been summed up to identify four major factors that have conditioned the rise and popularity of PIM (Table 3). The frequency of occurrence of these four factors has been taken as a proportion to the total number of papers. About 60% of the total papers have reported the failures of Government as the major reason leading to the rise of PIM (
Facon, 2002;
Poddar et al., 2011; Kulkarni and Tyagi, 2012;
Aarnoudse et al., 2018; Pek et al., 2019). This is followed by a greater trend towards transfer of responsibilities to the users and has been reported by 36% of the papers (
Uphoff, 1986;
Vermillion, 1991;
Mitra, 1992;
Geijer et al., 1996; Restrepo et al., 2007; Gandhi and Namboodiri, 2012). About 28% of the papers believe that the interventions by donor agencies like World Bank and Asian Development Bank have made PIM more acceptable and lucrative to the governments
(Chandrasekaran et al., 2002; Armanios, 2010;
Aarnoudse et al., 2018; Cambaza et al., 2020). Finally about 8% of the papers reported that PIM was introduced to reduce the financial burden of the government by curtailing the expenditure on irrigation through PIM and IMT (
Meinzen-Dick, 1997;
Groenfeldt and Sun, 1997;
Samad and Vermillion, 1999;
Restrepo et al., 2007).
Evaluation of PIM
The papers have been divided in their decision of PIM’s success, where while one group claims it to be success another presents it as a failure and a still another group remaining indecisive of the outcome. The papers have also varied in the use of indicators to assess the practice. Thus while some have considered agro-economic indicators (
Uysal and Altis, 2010;
Pek et al., 2019; Husain et al., 2020), others have considered institutional and behaviuoral indicators to assess the rate of participation and in turn PIM
(Ghosh et al., 2008; Kono et al., 2012). Thus the study has explored a diverse range of indicators and outcome as reported by the previous works.
Major indicators/Criteria used
Codes were assigned to club various indicators across papers under 8 heads. Three of them are from the agro-economic domain namely, crop related, water related and water fee collection indicator/ criteria; three related to the institutional features namely, awareness and training, participation and dispute resolution; one each criteria related to government spending and sustainability.
Majority of the papers have included the crop and water related indicators in their study (Table 4). The water related aspects of water supply, resolution of tail end deprivation, relative irrigation supply, irrigation water productivity among others to be the major indicators have been reported by 60% of the work (
Uysal and Altis, 2010;
Aarnoudse et al., 2018). About 45% of the studies have referred to crop related indicators namely; production, yield and economic returns, and about 35% of the papers have used the water fee collection criteria. About 25% (Awareness and training), 30% (Participation related) and 20% (Dispute resolution) of the papers have included the indicators related to institutional set up. About 47% papers have claimed that PIM is impacted by participation by the users. Only 20% of the works have included government spending indicator. Finally, sustainability has been considered by only 20% of the papers. By sustainability, the strength of the project to sustain in the long run is checked.
The success rate
Although none of the papers have utilised all the eight indicators for assessing PIM, yet each paper used atleast three out of the eight indicators for analysis. Table 5 shows that 45% of the studies (23 papers) have reported that PIM has not been successful. Only 30% of the works have regarded the practice of PIM a success. Again 25% of the papers couldn’t provide a clear view on the outcome of PIM. Considering the Region specific success rate, PIM has been reported to be most successful in Africa, especially in the Sub Saharan region of Africa. Next it is followed by Asia, where the major part of success comes from India, China and Thailand (
Sinclair, 2013;
Zhang et al., 2013; Zhou et al., 2017).
The introduction of PIM across the globe has brought about radical changes in the irrigation scenario. While a lot many studies have assessed the PIM/ IMT yet a few provide a decisive result on its outcome or performance. This study provides a list of glitches that were encountered in the preceding works in general and the process of PIM in particular.
Works were found to be biased in favour of some regions in general and some countries in particular. For instance, in Asia India (
Sinha, 2014;
Shivamohan and Scott, 1994) and China have been more in focus while in Africa, the Sub Saharan region has got the maximum focus. This emerges as a hindrance in the impact assessment as region specific studies emerge as mere case studies failing universal application.
The study couldn’t uncover any particular method or analysis technique that was developed by the preceding works to analyse the impact of PIM. While most of the studies did focus on the agro-economic and water related performance of the practice yet a consensus was lacking. But nevertheless, a loosely held method could be identified where the quantitative analysis used econometric techniques to measure the quantifiable indicators like crop outcome and irrigation supply while the qualitative analysis essentially involved a likert scale method to understand participation related results.
The measure of PIM’s ‘success’ and ‘failure’ couldn’t garner a common view or measure among the scholars. Again a bias can traced in favour of the agro-economic conditions and econometric methods to understand the rate of success, especially among the quantitative papers. These papers have failed to focus on the more qualitative institutional aspects of the practice. The works are mostly evaluated on two factors- OandM of irrigation and recovery of user fees, but other factors like user satisfaction, water delivery, equitability of distribution and other factors related to the water delivery services remain grossly underrated.
Aarnoudse et al. (2018) in their study of the Sub Saharan Africa have hinted at the lack of a proper evaluation scheme for WUAs that has impacted the proper monitoring of WUAs. Again only some papers have focused on the human part of this practice (
Ghosh et al., 2008; Fan et al., 2018; Miao, 2015;
Yang et al., 2021). There have been attempts by
Meinzen-Dick (1999) and
Mungsunti and Parton (2016) to identify the traditional way of farmer managed irrigation systems that don’t require external intervention. This demonstrates the inherent human tendency and capacity to form groups for resource management which needs to be highlighted in further research endeavours.
