Water Users Association and Irrigation Management - Institute for ...

production-function approach has been adopted to detennine the impact of soil salinity and
waterlogging on yield levels of paddy. Finally, in the third stage, from the estimated
production functions a decomposition exercise has been undertaken to analyze the impact
of changes in inputs and the quality of land on the yield variations. Further, logit regression
is employed to analyze the factors that influence the management strategies adopted by
fanners to mitigate the cnvironmental problems.
Theoretical approach and conceptual framework
At the macro leveL government may set a regulatory framework, fonnulate policies and
provide guidelines for water resource management; but in tinal analysis it is thc activities of
the individuals that count. Water and irrigation infrastructure are common pool resources,
due to their low excludability and high rivalry. The individual member's attitude and
behavior in using the water available to the group cannot be excluded. This lowexcludability
stems from the high costs of developing and implementing means of
individual regulation, while the rivalry stems from the fact that the consumption of a unit of
the good by one individual makes it unavailable to others. The difticulty of exclusion
reduces individual irrigators' incentives to contribute to the provision of the resource, as
non-contributors benefit equally from the flow without incurring the costs of provision.
Furthennore, the rival aspect of water resources and their common pool nature allows free
riders to sustain only a traction of social cost of their actions, thus producing an externality
that results in inefficient use of the resource. It is the combination of these two factors (Iowexcludability
and rivalry) that leads to the well-known common pool resource dilemma.
Institutions in the fonn of collective action may be one way in which societies can
overcome this dilemma.
There has been much discussion of the logic of collective action 2 during the last three
decades (Olson 1965; Ostrom 1992). Water resources management is an especially
enlightening illustration of the practical and theoretical problems of collective action. Some
have applied this reasoning directly to the problem of irrigation organization (Freeman &
2 Collective action is used to describe the process and consequences of individual decisions to voluntary coordinated
behavior. All cases of voluntary collaborative decision-making can be understood as collective
action.
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