ABSTRACT
Questions have centered on how to mobilize resources, insure accountability, link center and field, secure involvement and participation of affected parties, hold to responsible performance standards while at the same time provide for flexibility and productivity. The lessons advanced have been generated in one specific domain--the social organization of irrigated agriculture--and have implications for the development enterprize. Local grass-roots development, without local control over resources and appropriate linkages to large state bureaucracies, is likely to be inconsequential; but state bureaucracy cannot properly administer resource streams down to the individual users in highly varied social-ecological niches. Authority relationships must insure that local organizational leaders are responsible to definitions of success and failure advanced by local people as distinguished from upstream main system management. Informal local organizational arrangements are constructed among irrigators and between them and main system management in all instances.
