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CONTEXT: Worldwide farmer managed irrigation systems have provided crops for food, feed and the market for centuries. From high mountain environments to river valleys and deltas, in all continents people have organized to construct, use, maintain, transform and sustain irrigated agro-ecosystems. In this context it is important to better understand how these systems are sustained. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this contribution is to explore and theorize through which strategies and mechanisms irrigators are able to sustain these systems in a constantly changing socio-environmental context. METHODS: The study is based on ethnographic qualitative research in four areas where farmer managed irrigation systems are sustained by irrigators (Valencia region, Spain; Ecuadorian highlands; Cambodian Mekong delta; and Tsangano district, Mozambique). Research consisted of interviews and observations in these areas and was supported by a literature review of what has been published about these systems. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Results show that farmer managed irrigation systems are dynamic systems that constantly transform but that are sustained in these changes through what we term ‘communality’. We introduce this term to point out three interrelated elements that stand at the basis of farmer managed irrigation systems sustenance, namely: commons, community and polity. Analysis of the four case studies points out that these three elements are mobilized differently by farmers depending on their socio-environmental context. We show that the mobilization of these different elements amidst internal and external challenges and conflicts, forms the basis for the longevity and sustainability of collectively managed irrigation systems. SIGNIFICANCE: In the literature on farmer managed irrigation systems collective action has been portrayed as the main pillar that sustains these systems. This contribution challenges this notion by showing that irrigation systems are sustained by a combination of individual actions, collective practices, normative frameworks and organizational forms; a sense of community; and the development of political agency (polity). Recognizing that these elements come together as site specific hybrids opens new avenues of inquiry to better understand the sustainability of farmer managed irrigation systems.

This paper examines the politics of rural water governance in China through a governmentality lens and village water intervention case. The China Rural Drinking Water Safety Project (RDWSP) was an attempt to control water, while also serving as a tool of power to impel the rural population towards national development goals. The authors analyzed official documents and conducted interviews in a village in Shandong Province to investigate the RDWSP's rationale and practices, as well as how water access and management were negotiated by rural water users. The paper argues that (1) confronted with a decline in local governance capacity and in an effort to rectify the mistakes of the supply-driven, technocratic paradigm, the RDWSP attempted to integrate social, environmental and economic concerns but did not achieve that goal; (2) the decline in local governance capacity and people's pragmatic everyday strategies contributed to an individualized approach to solving water problems, reflected in people's disengagement from the government project and local participation, an effect that may sustain people's marginalization and exclusion from good-quality water access and management. Using the Chinese water project as an example, the paper contributes to the debate on state-induced water control versus civil society “counter-conduct” formed by daily interactions. Furthermore, it enriches the study of politics in general by presenting the state as a site of contested institutionalization and ongoing negotiations, confronted by everyday narratives and encounters with marginalized citizens that go far beyond and are far more complex than overt resistance or covert weapons of the weak.

In spite of the investment and efforts made for irrigation development, many irrigation schemes in Ethiopia are performing below design expectations leaving huge areas and many beneficiaries out of irrigation. In this study, a systematic literature review was conducted on management practices, problems and future directions of community managed small-scale irrigation schemes in Ethiopia. Out of 1282 published research reports retrieved from the data bases of Web of Science and Scopus, eventually 83 publications fulfilled the inclusion criteria. Failure and under-performance of irrigation schemes in Ethiopia is reported to mostly relate to problems during design and implementation and/or operation and maintenance. Low level of community participation, lack of site specific reliable hydrological data, poorly designed irrigation infrastructures, high construction cost and delayed project completion are most mentioned problems during the design and implementation phases of irrigation projects. Presence of weak local scheme managing institutions and users’ exclusion in management decisions are among the main problems of small-scale irrigation management practices in Ethiopia. Regardless of their water sources, irrigation schemes face similar problems in Ethiopia. Adoption of a holistic development and management strategy that integrates technical, socio-economic and environmental aspects is needed to overcome problems and sustainability challenges of community managed irrigation schemes in Ethiopia. Supporting the irrigation sector via research-based findings and adoption of advanced technologies needs further investments and efforts to narrow challenges of irrigation schemes sustainability gaps.

This paper explores the role of contract farming arrangements in agricultural intensification in sub-Saharan Africa, combining secondary literature and original case material from Mozambique. The paper extends the scope of “contract farming” beyond the formal contracts between large companies and small-scale producers to include less formal credit agreements between farmers and traders. It argues that such informal contract arrangements are evidence of farmers' agency in “real markets.” In the studied cases, farmers use contract farming opportunities to intensify agricultural production by investing in irrigation and inputs. While informal contracts typically concern locally consumed crops, thus with more possibilities for side selling than formal contracts for export crops with company-controlled markets, informal contract compliance reflects closely knit social ties between the contracting parties. In both formal and informal contracts, purchasers tend to seek out producers who are already irrigating, thus obtaining gains from farmers' earlier investments. This also implies contract farming as a mechanism for accelerating social differentiation arising from unequal access to irrigation. The paper argues that the significance of informal contracts in the studied cases raises the possibility that informal contract farming by local traders plays a more important role in agrarian transformation in Africa than formal contract farming by large companies.

International audience

Mega-damming, pollution and depletion endanger rivers worldwide. Meanwhile, modernist imaginaries of ordering ‘unruly waters and humans’ have become cornerstones of hydraulic-bureaucratic and capitalist development. They separate hydro/social worlds, sideline river-commons cultures, and deepen socio-environmental injustices. But myriad new water justice movements (NWJMs) proliferate: rooted, disruptive, transdisciplinary, multi-scalar coalitions that deploy alternative river–society ontologies, bridge South–North divides, and translate river-enlivening practices from local to global and vice-versa. This paper's framework conceptualizes ‘riverhood’ to engage with NWJMs and river commoning initiatives. We suggest four interrelated ontologies, situating river socionatures as arenas of material, social and symbolic co-production: ‘river-as-ecosociety’, ‘river-as-territory’, ‘river-as-subject’, and ‘river-as-movement’.

Virtual water flows, incorporated in global food trade has increased the last decade. The drivers and consequences are complex. These complex relations between humans and water resources are studied from different perspectives. In this article, an overview of four such perspectives on water in global food production and trade is provided. These four perspectives are: (1) More crop per drop for increasing production, (2) Less drop per crop for reducing impacts, (3) National food security and import dependency; and (4) Local values and implications of water used in export food production. Each of the perspectives is valuable in the sense of representing different value frameworks, which represent contrasting norms and convictions, belief systems, and discourses; which are often incommensurable.

Janwillem Liebrand, Wouter Beekman, Chris de Bont and Gert Jan Veldwisch demonstrate that in spite of large investment in top-down large scale irrigation schemes, bottom up and farmers-driven irrigation should not be underestimated. After a twenty-year hiatus in public investments in agriculture and irrigation, donors, as well as many national governments in Africa, have increased their loan - and grant budgets, and national budgets respectively. It marks a change in a liberalization agenda that has its origin in the 1980s, and shows that agriculture and irrigation are back on the global development agenda. In the current research-policy debate in Africa, a major focus of the investments in agriculture is extending the area under reliable water control systems for irrigation, based on a set of persuasive assumptions on the potential of modern technology in agriculture. These assumptions frame the question of ‘agricultural productivity’ in very narrow ways and limit the analysis of complex dynamics and impacts of flows of investments in agriculture and irrigation on the ground. Notably, they underpin a policy debate in which farmers’ initiatives in developing irrigation in Africa are grossly overlooked, and support a tendency to disregard farmers’ diverse livelihoods and aspirations, with the risk that they are left behind.

We examine the social resistance against large dams as environmental justice movements in four case studies - the Sardar Sarovar Project from India, the Hidrosogamoso from Colombia, the ‘new water culture’ movement in Spain, and the Lesotho Highlands Project from Lesotho - with diverse social, political and environmental contexts. We discuss three broad issues. First, the nature of the involvement of civil society and metropolitan intelligentsia in leadership roles. Second, how cross-class and multi-sectoral alliances have been forged between the local and the global. And third, how the notion of environmental justice in relation to social justice is adopted in these movements.

This article explores the encounter between two contrasting visions of how the hydrosocial territory of the Elgin Valley of South Africa is, and should be, constituted and the conflicts over water pollution this gives rise to. It studies how poor urban dwellers try to upset the status quo of unequal access to land and water, which is linked to broader, historically entrenched, inequalities. White commercial farmers have succeeded in upholding the dominant hydro-territorial order by emphasizing the economic importance of their sector, by reducing complex political issues to technical challenges, and by capturing ‘democratic’ water institutions.

In this special issue, we set out to analyze the dynamics, discourses, identities and material conditions that evolve with increasing urbanization and associated transformations of rural–urban (dis...

Farmer-led irrigation development, a process in which farmers initiate the establishment of irrigation, is increasingly recognised as the driving force behind irrigation expansion, agricultural intensification, and commercialisation in sub-Saharan Africa. Governments and development agencies aim to build upon these practices to further stimulate agricultural production and expand the irrigated area. In what seems the recognition of farmers’ ability to take the lead, various African states have developed policies for ‘demand-driven irrigation development’. This article scrutinises the actual practices of such a policy through a case analysis of an intervention in Northern Tanzania. The analysis demonstrates how even demand-driven policies can disturb the development trajectory of farmer-led irrigation development by reinforcing modernisation ideals adhered to by both farmers and government employees. An emphasis on the aesthetics of modernity leads to symbolic modernisation, cementing the dominant role of the state and formal expertise and paralysing farmers’ irrigation development initiatives. This does not necessarily lead to agricultural intensification and commercialisation, which the formal policies seem to aim for and which is central to processes of farmer-led irrigation development.

This article explores how irrigation management transfer policies were implemented in Mali, Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. In Mali and Mozambique, where the irrigation bureaucracy controlled one large irrigation system, state agencies retained control over irrigation management despite reduced state funding. In Malawi and Zimbabwe, where the state irrigation systems and the irrigation bureaucracy were smaller, users have taken over irrigation management, but are having trouble sustaining irrigated agriculture. We show how irrigation management transfer policies were shaped by the interplay between international donors, macro-economic dynamics, national politics and the interactions with (and the nature of) irrigation infrastructure, bureaucracies and organized users.

This paper explores how pump irrigation has evolved along the Kenyan shores of Lake Victoria. Over the past two decades access to petrol pumps has allowed small-scale horticultural enterprises to start up and then transform the size, intensity and nature of their production. We analyse the spread of petrol pumps as the assimilation and wider use of a modern device along a mutated trajectory of change. We argue that it was not led by external actors but is a local and self-organised process driven by actors who negotiated interfaces between themselves and those operating at the macro level. The assimilation unfolded not as a temporally and spatially linear process but through its embeddedness in complex and dynamic social relationships that structure access to the key resources required for vegetable production. This in turn has given rise to a range of strategies in which the pumps' performance is adjusted to fit with various socially differentiated contexts.

In 2007, for the first time in human history, the world’s population became more urban than rural – a trend that is expected to increase in the coming decades, reaching 66% by 2030. While being ‘po...

In both Mozambique and Tanzania, farmer-led development of irrigation is widespread, yet it is little recognised in irrigation policies and is under-supported by the government. This paper explores how this situation is exacerbated by modernisation ideas in irrigation policy and professional thinking. By means of a historical review, we trace modernisation thinking in irrigation development from the colonial period onwards, and analyse how this thinking continues to play out in contemporary irrigation policies in both countries. We then examine the relationship between modernisation thinking and practices of farmer-led irrigation development, drawing on policy documents, field studies, and interviews in both countries. Based on this analysis, we argue that the nature of farmer-led development of irrigation is consistent with many of the goals identified by state agricultural modernisation programmes, but not with the means by which government and state policies envisage their achievement. As a consequence, policies and state officials tend to screen out farmers' irrigation initiatives as not relevant to development until they are brought within state-sanctioned processes of technical design and administration. © 2019, Water Alternatives Association.

Introduction Over the past decade, much media, academic, and policy attention has focused on the rapid growth of large-scale land deals around the world (see Borras and Franco, 2010; Cotula, 2012; Cotula et al., 2009; Deininger, 2011; De Schutter, 2011; GRAIN, 2008; Li, 2011; Oxfam, 2011; von Braun and Meinzen-Dick, 2009; White et al., 2012; World Bank, 2010; Zoomers, 2010). The rush to acquire land as sources of alternative energy, food and feed crops, and environmental services led to the phenomenon popularly known as “land grabbing,” which made global headlines and contributed to skyrocketing global food prices in 2008. Drawing on notions of “marginal,” “waste,” “vacant,” “idle,” and “unproductive” lands, powerful transnational and national actors moved into large-scale agriculture to take advantage of potential windfall gains in sub-sectors such as biofuels, “flex crops” (e.g. sugar cane, palm oil, maize, soya - see Borras et al., 2012) and other major commodities (e.g. rice, wheat and other cash crops). Conservation and climate change mitigation measures also drove new demands for land (hence the notion of “green grabbing,” cf. Fairhead et al., 2012).Headline attention to “land grabbing” also turned a spotlight (albeit comparatively weaker) on the implications for existing surface water and groundwater resources (hence the notion of “water grabbing,” see Transnational Institute, 2014a). Early on, evidence suggested that in many cases the location of land grabbing was motivated also by the desire to capture water resources (Skinner and Cotula, 2011; Smaller and Mann, 2009; Woodhouse and Ganho, 2011). Although water is a potential constraint on large-scale agricultural projects, many land deal contracts did not explicitly mention water requirements (Woodhouse, 2012). Meanwhile, the land grabbed was rarely “marginal” but either already being used by small-and large-scale producers, or of prime quality and associated with irrigation facilities, or with the potential to acquire fresh water from river systems or aquifers; in arid areas, land is plentiful, and agricultural expansion will not create conflict until water is provided. This raised the crucial question of whether this water is truly “available,” unsustainably withdrawn (ultimately undermining the land’s quality), or unequally reallocated (away from existing users).Although initial media and policy attention associated land grabbing almost exclusively with large-scale food, feed and fuel crops, later research and advocacy moved beyond this limited focus on agriculture-driven resource-grabbing.

This paper contributes to the discussion about ‘inclusive business models’ as alternatives to large-scale land acquisitions by analysing a case in which a foreign agribusiness investor, within an impact investment paradigm, acquired and rehabilitated a rice processing plant in Chókwè, Mozambique. A contract farming programme drawn up to source raw produce for the factory led to radical shifts in control over land and water resources. The case is set against the background of a large-scale irrigation system that has played an important role in national agricultural policies since colonial times. The private sector-led development approach is strongly supported by the state which portrays it as an opportunity to reduce its dependency on rice imports. The investor redirected the benefits of land and water use through taking a role of coordination and control within the irrigated production system. The ensuing rural transformation reminds one of earlier periods in the development of the irrigation system: the central control over production, and the very high level of agricultural inputs and mechanisation, remind one of the state socialist period, while the removal of smallholders from their land and its concentration in the hands of a few bears a strong resemblance to the scheme’s establishment under colonial rule

Introduction In the past few years, independently of each other, we encountered ferocious promoters of ‘technologies for development’, such as drip irrigation, conservation agriculture, the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), or the better known Jatropha or Bt Cotton seeds. The missionary zeal with which these were promoted and defended (and sometimes attacked) struck us. Upon closer scrutiny these were not only technologies for development but rather ‘packages of sociotechnical practices’ ...

A “policy as process” perspective is adopted to analyze the early period of water users associations (WUAs) in Uzbekistan (2000–2006). The article is based on extensive fieldwork (in 2005–2006) and analysis of policy and other relevant documents. It is shown that WUAs have a role and logic beyond water management and are used by the state as instruments with which to monitor and regulate “state-ordered” agricultural production. Through a state-centric policy process with room for local experimentation, the WUA was fit into the socio-political landscape of continued state control and the increased role of individualized risks and benefits.

This paper describes how political and economic transition has affected the system of agricultural production in Khorezm, Uzbekistan in terms of economic practices and relationships. Based on recent fieldwork, the paper argues that the local agricultural economy is a hybrid economy, where production for market, quasi-market and subsistence merge into and co-constitute one another. In order to keep the system going, and to make up for the uncertainties in the formal context of production, the relation between new private fermer and the peasant (dehkan) households is of particular importance. This relation resembles neo-patrimonial patron–client relations, which are both personal and informal while also being based on formal, contractual relations. The relations are asymmetric and based on the limited and unevenly distributed resources. The division of power is unequal but not fixed, due to the ongoing transition of the economic system.

The most recent land reform in Uzbekistan, in which Large Farm Enterprises (LFEs) were split into medium-sized fermer enterprises, left, alongside the country's overwhelming majority of small dekhan peasants, continued strong state intervention in agrarian production. Three ‘forms’ (rather than ‘modes’) of production emerged: (1) state-ordered production of cotton and wheat; (2) commercial production, in particular of rice; and (3) household production of other food staples, including wheat and rice. These production ‘forms’ or processes are characterised by distinct input and output relations, terms of trade and technical requirements. They interrelate through competition for limited resources, such as land, water and other inputs, rather than competition amongst the actors themselves (the state, the new medium-sized fermers and the small dekhan peasants). A contest over resources is particularly evident between the (state-ordered) cotton crop and the (commercial) rice crop in the case study on which our...

This article contributes to the contemporary debate on land and water grabbing through a detailed, qualitative case study of horticultural agribusinesses which have settled in Tanzania, disrupting patterns of land and water use. In this paper we analyse how capitalist settler farms and their upstream and downstream peasant neighbours along the Nduruma river, Tanzania, expand and defend their water use. The paper is based on 3 months of qualitative field work in Tanzania. We use the echelons of rights analysis framework combined with the concept of institutional bricolage to show how this contestation takes place over the full spectrum of actual abstractions, governance and discourses. We emphasise the role different (inter)national development narratives play in shaping day-to-day contestations over water shares and rule-making. Ultimately, we emphasise that water grabbing is not a one-time event, but rather an on-going struggle over different water resources. In addition, we show how a perceived beneficial development of agribusinesses switching to groundwater allows them to avoid peasant-controlled institutions, avoiding further negotiation between the different actors and improving their image among neighbouring communities. This development illustrates how complex and obscured processes of water re-allocation can be without becoming illegal per se.

In 2005 the Uzbek government accelerated the dissolution process of collective farms through full-scale land reform. As the central production unit, the collective enterprise was supplanted by a private, family-based enterprise. Simultaneously Water Users Associations (WUAs) were established that operate and maintain the irrigation and drainage infrastructure of the former collective farms. Though these land-cum-water reforms could in principle initiate enormous changes, there is still a strong continuity due to the state-regulated agricultural system. Although officially only cotton and wheat production are still subject to a state order system, the whole agricultural production is still under strict state control. This paper builds on research conducted during the spring and summer of 2005 and 2006 in the oasis of Khorezm, Uzbekistan. Through field walks in combination with semi- and non-structured interviews, two cases of water management at former collective farm (FCF) level were distinguished: one at the onset of reform and one two years after full-scale reforms. The former shows the strong interlinkage at FCF level between the control of agricultural production and water management. However, the second case shows that even in the post-reform context, where the co-ordination of production and the control of cropping areas are formally no longer arranged at this level, these functions are informally reproduced through the new institutions. The WUA forms a crucial link between privatised producers and a state preoccupied with control.

The contestation and appropriation of water is not new, but it has been highlighted by recent global debates on land grabbing. Water grabbing takes place in a field that is locally and globally plural-legal. Formal law has been fostering both land and water grabs but formal water and land management have been separated from each otheran institutional void that makes encroachment even easier. Ambiguous processes of global water and land governance have increased local-level uncertainties and complexities that powerful players can navigate, making them into mechanisms of exclusion of poor and marginalised people. As in formal land management corporate influence has grown. For less powerful players resolving ambiguities in conflicting regulatory frameworks may require tipping the balance towards the most congenial. Yet, compared with land governance, global water governance is less contested from an equity and water justice perspective, even though land is fixed, while water is fluid and part of the hydrological cycle; therefore water grabbing potentially affects greater numbers of diverse water users. Water grabbing can be a powerful entry point for the contestation needed to build counterweights to the neoliberal, corporate business-led convergence in global resource governance discourses and processes. Elaborating a human right to water in response to water grabbing is urgently needed.

The case of Munda Munda irrigation system in Nante, Zambezia, Mozambique, is an example of how a smallholder community, with the active support of local NGOs, has successfully defended its land and water resources against several attempts of resource grabbing. This article examines the strategies the community used to defend its resources. After an initial struggle over legal entitlements the discussion shifted to questions of efficient and productive use of the land. This shift is possible in the context of Mozambican land law which prohibits land from being privately owned while simultaneously aiming to regulate external investments on a basis of arguments of productive use of resources. Smallholders sustained their claim of productive use by switching to ‘modern’ technologies (tractor, fertilizers, improved seeds), investments in infrastructure (rehabilitation and extension of the irrigation system) and commercialisation of their production (increase of yields, processing and marketing). At a second level the case reveals a conflict between two alternative rural development models, the company/concessionary model and the smallholder/cooperative model. The dynamics in Nante are an expression of how this dichotomy plays out at a local level. The article is based on a long-term involvement in the area since 2004.

On the basis of intensive fieldwork in the period 2002–2006, which combined interviews with direct observations, the implementation of two policies in the field of agricultural water management in Uzbekistan is analysed: the reform of the water bureaucracy along basin boundaries and the establishment of Water Users Associations. It is shown that the Uzbek government used these policies creatively for addressing some pressing issues, while the inherent decentralisation objective was pushed to the far background. Both reforms are used to strengthen the state’s grip on agricultural production regulation. The latter is at the centre of day-to-day agricultural water management dynamics. It is shown that decentralisation policies originally developed in society-centric policy processes cannot be easily applied in countries with state-centric politics such as Uzbekistan.

Low crop productivity, food insecurity, hunger and malnutrition; inadequate farming knowledge and skills, implements and inputs are characteristic of smallholder agriculture in Southern Africa. Many researchers argue that conservation agriculture can guarantee higher crop productivity, food security, improved livelihoods and environmental protection, better than the unsustainable traditional systems of slash and burn practices. In this paper, we present the results of a meta-analysis of over 40 academic publications to review conservation agriculture’s role in influencing desired livelihood outcomes in Southern Africa. We conclude that the effectiveness of conservation agriculture towards better livelihood outcomes in Southern Africa remains debatable, especially when supportive government policies are lacking.

Part I 1. Follow the Water Murat Arsel and Max Spoor Part II: Transformation Of Water Regimes 2. Water, War And Reconstruction Irrigation Management In The Kunduz Region, Afghanistan Iskandar Abdullayev, Katja Mielke, Peter P. Mollinga, Jan Monsees, Conrad Schetter, Usman Shah, and Bernie Ter Steege 3. Political Ecology Of Marshland Restoration In Iraq Joshua Ellis and Murat Arsel 4. Wells, Water Rights and Sustainability: New Politics And Practices Mongolia's Pastoral Commons Caroline Upton 5. 'Adapting to Demands': Allocation, Scheduling and Delivery of Irrigation Water in Khorezm, Uzbekistan Gert Jan Veldwisch Part III: Waterscapes of Conflict and Cooperation 6. Water and Geopolitics in Central Asia Iskandar Abdullayev, Herath Manthrithilake and Jusipbek Kazbekov 7. Conflict and Cooperation In The South Caucasus: The Kura-Araks Basin of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia Berrin Basak Vener and Michael E. Campana 8. 'Have Your Cake And Eat It Too': Agenda Setting In Central Asian Transboundary Rivers Kai Wegerich 9. Institutional Change, Cooperation And Conflict In Two Central Asia's River Basins Anatoly Krutov and Max Spoor Part IV: Re-Stating Water Management 10. The Politics of Kyrgyz Water Policy Elke Herrfahrdt-Pahle 12. Water in Turkmenistan Ivan Stanchin and Zvi Lerman 11. Cotton, Environment and Poverty: The Case of Uzbekistan Max Spoor Part V 13. Securing the Future, Democratizing Development: The Role of Water Murat Arsel and Max Spoor

The establishment of the Bwanje Valley Irrigation Scheme (BVIS) in Malawi is a striking example of informed amnesia in development assistance. Despite the lessons learned earlier concerning a process approach to participatory irrigation development in Africa, in the case of BVIS outside interveners designed an irrigation system and parachuted it into Bwanje Valley as a black-boxed technology. Using a sociotechnical approach, this article analyses the travails of this irrigation scheme, showing that the conventional irrigation factory mindset is ill-suited for creating durable water networks. Achieving tangible improvements in rural livelihoods is better served by the interactive prototyping of water networks in situ, ensuring that new irrigation schemes are embedded in existing landscapes and complementary to existing livelihood strategies rather than supplanting them.

This paper examines the organisational modalities of farmer-led irrigation systems in Tsangano, Mozambique, which has expanded over large areas with minimal external support. By looking at their historic development trajectories and the integrated nature of land and water resources, technological objects, and people three organisational modalities of irrigation system Operation and Maintenance are distinguished for furrow systems in Tsangano: communal systems, former Portuguese systems, and family systems. Each organisational modality is based on a particular development/investment history through which hydraulic property relations have been established and sustained. The findings cast serious doubts on the central tenets of neo-institutional policy prescriptions. This is particularly relevant as there is a renewed interest in large-scale irrigation development in Africa through public investment, after very limited investments between 1985 and 2005. Public irrigation investment in Africa has been widely perceived to have performed poorly. Farmer-led irrigation development, could be the basis for a cost-effective alternative to scale investments that can result in sustainable and pro-poor smallholder irrigation. The findings in this paper show how investments in infrastructure can create, recreate or extinguish hydraulic property and ownership relations, which can lead to collapse. Interveners should carefully investigate prior investment patterns and context-specific cultural logics that inform the sustainability of farmer-led irrigation development.

"In the context of the prevalent neo-liberal discourse on rural development through improved markets, involvement of companies and a strong reliance on foreign investors this article examines the vulnerable position of smallholder irrigators and their water rights. Through the parallel analysis of three contrasting cases of smallholder irrigation in Mozambique and a comparison with formal Mozambican law, it is shown that a big gap exists between formal water rights and water rights in practice. For each case, it is shown how land and water rights are connected and how a successful defence of land rights provides a good basis for a defence of smallholder water rights. Furthermore, as productivity and efficiency arguments are prominent and influential, those smallholders who are able to turn their use into the production of economic value manage best to materialise their claims on both land and water. The paper concludes with recommendations to strengthen the position of smallholders in response to increasing threats of land and water grabbing."