ABSTRACT
Local irrigation organizations are assemblies of joint agreements between farmers and main system managers which make it possible to produce, through provision and use of physical structures, a collective good not available through individual effort. A critical variable in middle-level organizations is that of establishing authority relationships. A middle-level irrigation organization may be staffed by "cosmopolitans" or "locals." "Cosmopolitans" are defined as professionals who are recruited from outside the local command area, who are typically selected based on educational qualifications which emphasize comprehension of nomothetic knowledge in a given discipline, who usually exhibit considerable social distance from local farmers, and whose career aspirations are for upward mobility and departure from the local irrigation command. Distributional share systems greatly influence the appropriate design of joint agreements for establishing membership, capturing water from the main system, allocating water to farmer demand, and mobilizing resources to pay the organizational costs of water management.
