Participation and Governance in Local Water Management

This paper is about participation in irrigation water management. It questions the ongoing approaches to local water management emphasizing participation and governance. It argues that such approaches still reveal several shortcomings especially on their simplistic views on local organization and participation and calls further shift in current approaches to initiate and sustain local water management. Such a new approach needs to consider wider support and networking from relevant stakeholders and be adoptive with dynamic nature of different water control dimensions, so that complex problems of water management can be locally developed and sustained. Examples are drawn from case studies materials from Nepal.