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The article examines gender as a factor in the allocation of water resources within rural households, including both input, as for agricultural cultivation, and consumption, as in cooking and cleaning. Research indicates that women's access to water resources is interrelated to their access to land, income and markets, and is therefore a valid criterion in developing water policies.

Governments, NGOs and financers invest considerable resources in rural domestic water supplies and irrigation development. However, elite capture and underuse, if not complete abandonment, are frequent. While the blame is often put on 'corrupt, lazy and indisciplined' communities, this article explores the question of how the public water sector itself contributes to this state of affairs. Four case studies, which are part of the research project Cooperation and Conflict in Local Water Governance, are examined: two domestic water supply projects (Mali, Vietnam); one participatory multiple use project (Zambia); and one large-scale irrigation project (Bolivia). It was found that accountability of water projects was upward and tended to lie in construction targets for single uses with already allocated funding. This rendered project implementers dependent upon the village elite for timely spending. Yet, the elite appeared hardly motivated to maintain communal schemes, unless they themselves benefited. The dependency of projects on the elite can be reduced by ensuring participatory and inclusive planning that meets the project's conditions before budget allocation. Although such approaches are common outside the water sector, a barrier in the water sector is that central public funds are negotiated by each sector by profiling unique expertise and single livelihood goals, which trickle down as single use silos. The article concludes with reflections on plausible benefits of participatory multiple use services for equity and sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gendered poverty alleviation is an important aim of many governmental and non-governmental irrigation agencies. This paper argues that the contribution of irrigation agencies to poverty alleviation is optimal if agencies target their support, and vest rights to newly developed irrigated land and water primarily in poor women and men. It is shown that the often-assumed trade-off between poverty alleviation and production growth probably does not exist. Further, agencies themselves play a preponderant role in including or excluding poor women and men in respect of rights in irrigated land and water. This role is especially strong in public irrigation, the focus of this paper. Evidence on the role of public irrigation agencies in allocating irrigated land and water rights is reviewed. Irrigated land is allocated through the site selection of infrastructural intervention, with or without changes in land tenure in the command area. Inclusion and exclusion occur implicitly through three principles of water rights allocation: on the basis of co-investments in infrastructure, on the basis of household composition, and on the basis of type of land rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]