ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to summarize fundamental, key ideas about social organization that have been derived from project experience in irrigation development, which may have generalizable validity beyond the case level, and which, therefore, may be useful in planning future water management projects in developing settings. Field workers in irrigation schemes use programmable handheld computers to compile data in the field without access to university computing facilities. Major irrigation development schemes or on-farm water management projects are thus never solely a matter of changing individual farmer behavior in order to improve efficiencies, but also are based on building the connections between farmers and between farmers and organizations. The function of irrigation organization is to design and manage the institutions and physical structures which economically deliver water in a reliable and timely manner with the highest possible degree of control at the farm level.
