ABSTRACT
Throughout Asia, state investments in irrigation are very large and predicted to remain so. Discussions of irrigation investment often focus on the choice of technology and scale of the systems to be built. Everywhere in Asia individual farmers and groups of farmers are making private investments in irrigation. The communal irrigation model of Bali is probably the best known of the traditional irrigation works of Asia. In irrigation development, there is a large informal sector represented by the investments which local groups make in irrigation development, both in the terminal unit level of government-managed systems and in small community-managed ones. A strategy of indirect investment in which the state assists local people in making their own investments and in creating their own irrigation property would support the formation of social groups based on their common relationship to irrigation property. There have been several important writings dealing with the relationship between property and social organizations in the context of irrigated agriculture.
