Abstract
The concepts of irrigation governance and management are often confused while reforming irrigation institutions. This paper distinguishes between irrigation governance and management and articulates the governance concept and its ingredients through a literature review. The governance performance of irrigation reforms from selected cases in Asia is analyzed using a conceptual model. The paper identifies five key concepts in analyzing governance reform as institutions, intentions, instruments, implementation and impact. The analysis reveals that poor governance results from poor design of representation and accountability in the reform. The interplay between institutions, their intentions, instruments and implementation arrangements used by reformers in the selected cases have tended to create information asymmetries amongst the users, which have led to poor awareness and participation by potential members for effective governance. When reforming irrigation governance attention needs to be paid to institutions, reform intentions, instruments, and implementation arrangements simultaneously. Design weaknesses of any one of these four components of governance can lead to suboptimal impacts. The studied management transfer programs remained unable to improve irrigation governance owing to weakness in one or more of these governance ingredients. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.