Social Capital, Local Government, and the Management of Irrigation Systems in Northwest China

Shortage in irrigation water has become a serious problem in rural China. Governments are trying to build more Water User Associations (WUAs) to improve the management of irrigation water. Better management would reduce the agricultural use of water and allocate more water to protect the environment, especially in arid and semi-arid areas where the ecological environment is very fragile. Therefore, it is important to know how WUAs have been organized, whether they have had contributions to water management, as well as how satisfied water users are. This report is among the first to characterize the situation of WUAs in northwest China. This report has three contributions. First, the report shows a relatively poor implementation of the reform to transfer management to WUAs in China. Many of the villagers did not even know that WUAs existed. The poor implementation of the reform program implies that water users were not officially entitled to the rights to manage these resources. Second, the report shows that the quality of local government was the main determinant of users’ awareness on the existence of WUAs. This result implies that a more responsible government is needed to improve the efforts in implementing the reform or/and in transferring power to water users. Moreover, the awareness of users about the WUAs and the quality of government both had positive effects on the performance of WUAs. These combined facts suggest that a more responsible local government not only has direct positive contribution to the performance of WUAs, but that it also affects performance by increasing awareness among community members. Third, the coefficients of social capital and/or that of the interaction terms of social capital and awareness were significant in many of the regression models on the performance of WUAs and on the satisfaction of water users. The results suggest that social capital could affect the performance of WUAs. Considering that the coefficients of trust aggregated at the administrative village level were not significant in all the models, we can conclude that only the trust in the densely-connected community could be useful for community management. This result suggests that defining the boundary of common pool resources at the natural village level is very important for social capital to be effective.