In this section you’ll learn about:
- participatory design and its implications for farmer-led irrigation development.
- the importance of real participation.
Irrigation systems for smallholders designed by experts often fail to deliver the expected results.
As we have seen in section two, participatory design methodologies have previously been promoted as an approach towards sustainable irrigation development. However, from the early 1990’s until around the late 2000’s, there was a standstill in the development and improvement of approaches to designing smallholder irrigation systems, coupled with a period of very low international investment in such systems.
Interest and investment in irrigation has now picked up again – but technocratic design and implementation practices still seem to have the upper hand. Why?
Definitions
To understand how we can best work with farmers in a genuinely participatory manner, we need to define key terms.
- A design is the end product of the design process.
- Design approaches are methods for shaping the design process.
- An irrigation system is the infrastructure needed to take, transport and deliver water to crops.
- An irrigation design is not simply a technical plan. It also encapsulates an implicit social, organisational and economic rationale for the overall design.
- Once construction starts, how a design approach is operationalised (either by the engineer as part of the process or by the farmers after the fact through appropriation) is a critical factor in the success of the scheme. However, it is regularly ignored as the official design process often ends when the technical plans are approved.