Irrigation Governance Challenges in the Mediterranean Region: Learning from Experiences and Promoting Sustainable Performance

This book will focus on the Mediterranean region where PIM/ IMT has long established traditions but when applied in countries with little historical experience, significant difficulties have been found. It aims to learn from the existing successful and less successful experiences which detailed analysis will provide good guidance to improve. Considerable emphasis will be placed on the use of modern management tools (DSS and M&E) to improve the performance of local organizations and irrigation agencies. Guidance is becoming imperative, Med Countries having embarked on a second modernization of their irrigation systems.

This book aims at deriving governance and sustainability lessons from analysing the implementation and management of some major irrigation programs in the Mediterranean Region. Eight countries are targeted, namely: Spain, Italy, Albania, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco. The main focus programs include the modernisation and rehabilitation of the existing irrigation systems, the transfer of irrigation management responsibilities to water users’ organizations, public private partnerships arrangements, the monitoring & evaluation of participatory irrigation management and transfer processes, and the governance of groundwater resources for irrigation. The adopted approach relies on learning from the value of each single experience, and on advancing solutions that emerge from their comparative analysis and that may be of guidance to those engaged in these programs.  The country experiences indicated that often times, significant shortcomings in the implementation of these programs have occurred and hopefully, this book could be a source of inspiration for the corrective actions needed.