Impacts Of Governance Rules Implementation Of Irrigation Water Self-governance Organization On Farmer Households’ Irrigation Behaviors And Irrigation Preformance

Irrigated agriculture plays an important role in developing agricultural modernization and increasing farmers’ income in China.By 2019,China’s irrigated agriculture only uses about 50% of farm land to produce 75% of grain and more than 90% of its cash crops.However,irrigated agriculture is facing the shortage and overuse of key production factors.On the one hand,given the growing water demand for non-agricultural purposes,the amount of water available for the development of irrigated agriculture is becoming increasingly limited.On the other hand,outstanding fertilizer overuse concludes soil hardening and agricultural pollution problems.That is,potential water-shortage and over-fertigation exists,thus its negative effect on farmers’ agricultural income.Therefore,it is very important for irrigated agriculture sustainable development and farmers’ income increasing by improving use efficiency of land and water and reducing fertilizer use intensity.Recently,China has further increased the promotion of water and fertilizers saving irrigation technology,and constantly promoted the reform of irrigation water management system and grass-roots governance.However,the grass-roots irrigation governance still faces many dilemmas,such as insufficient mobilization capacity of public irrigation services,chaos of grass-roots irrigation governance,inefficient implementation of "one case,one discussion" system in grass-roots irrigation self-governance organization,and frequent illegal behaviors such as digging wells and weirs without permission.In order to improve the governance dilemma,the grass-roots irrigation governance continues to reform.But in practice,there are some disputes about market-oriented reform,developing rural cooperative organizations and reshaping rural regime.In fact,irrigation self-governance organization is the backbone of grass-roots irrigation governance and reform.From the perspective of irrigation self-governance organization,focusing on the specific problems faced by the current self-governance organization and deeply exploring the underlying mechanism will provide theoretical and practical reference,for which solving the problems of grass-roots irrigation governance,breaking through the current governance and reform dilemma,and exploring the reform scheme of grass-roots irrigation governance with Chinese characteristics.In order to understand the specific problems faced by grass-roots irrigation self-governance organization,combined with the state of water-shortage,the promotion of collective drip irrigation technology and the typicality of grass-roots irrigation governance,we selected Awati County in Xinjiang as our research site.In the research area,we found three phenomena.First,irrigation self-governance organization use a variety of social networks to help implement supervision and punishment rules to control farmers’ illegal irrigation water extraction,but the phenomenon of farmers’ illegal irrigation water extraction still exists.Illegal irrigation water extraction jeopardizes equitable water use rights,potentially threatens the effectiveness and sustainability of grass-roots irrigation governance.Second,local irrigation self-governance organization decided on use,maintenance and management of collective drip irrigation system through democratic consultation meeting.However,some farmers often stop using collective drip irrigation systems because of the high cost of democratic consultation and poor effect of irrigation and fertilization.The behavior of stopping using the collective drip irrigation systems not only results in a huge waste of resources,but also makes collective drip irrigation technology unable to save water,save fertilizer and increase yield.It is ultimately difficult to achieve the original intention of protecting environment,alleviating the effect of water shortage on agricultural development,and increasing farmers’ income.From the above two phenomena,it can be seen that grass-roots irrigation governance faces the potential problem of ineffective implementation of the governance rules.Third,among Chinese small farmers,there is a general awareness of fertilization that more fertilizers product more agriculture production and reducing fertilizers would be reducing agriculture productions.That is,potential over-fertigation exists and thus its negative effect on the yield.These imply that such awareness may weaken fertilizer-saving and land productivity-improving of drip irrigation if without any incentives or intervention.The question is what kind of intervention does the local irrigation self-governance organization provide and what is the result of the intervention?Therefore,the objective of this paper is to explore the reasons and consequence of failure in governance rules implementation by answering three questions:(1)what are the characteristics of governance structure and governance rules of irrigation self-governance organization?(2)what is the effect of the governance rules implementation on farmers’ illegal irrigation water extraction and stopping using the collective drip irrigation systems?(3)what is the impact of the governance rules implementation on the performance of fertilizer-saving and yield-improving performance effects of collective drip irrigation systems? The insight into these questions not only provide a breakthrough point for promoting grass-roots irrigation governance reform,but also provide scientific evidence and practical reference for improving rural public governance and promoting rural revitalization.This paper contributes to the literature threefold.First,in the limited previous illegal irrigation water extraction literature,the decision-making logic of illegal irrigation water extraction and the effect of social norms on illegal irrigation water extraction have been discussed,but less research has been conducted to examine effect of social networks on whether farmers illegally extract irrigation water or not,and the effect factors of probability and frequency of illegal irrigation water extraction.Second,the existing literature distinguishes the adoption decision and use decision of new technology,but less attention is paid to the use decision.in the limited previous literature,only one paper focuses on the farmers’ decisions to use or stop making use of collective irrigation systems.It is found that transaction costs may evidently affect farmers’ decisions to use or stop making use of collective irrigation systems.However,there is no research examine this effect by using quantitative method.Third,the previous literature investigated the performance of irrigation self-governance organization(such as the degree of satisfaction to water use,and maintenance of irrigation facilities),and its influencing factors(such as natural conditions,social capital,rural governance,and intervention).Less research has been done on performance of fertilizer-saving and yield-improving performance effects of collective drip irrigation systems(such as governance rules implementation).Therefore,based on the self-governance theory,this paper uses case analysis method to analyze the connotation,characteristics and differences of governance structure and governance rules among the two local irrigation self-governance organizations in Awati County.Then we use a variety of econometric analysis method to empirical analysis the effect of governance rules implementation on irrigation behaviors and its performance.The main conclusions are as follows.(1)In the aspect of governance structure,flooding irrigation self-governance organization is the combination of peer group principal and simple hierarchy agent under the principal-agent structure,and the collective drip irrigation self-governance organization is the combination of peer group principal and individual or peer group agent under the principal-agent structure.(2)In the aspect of governance rules,in flooding irrigation self-governance organization,rules-in-use are basically stable,and the frequency of collective choice rules is low.While in collective drip irrigation self-governance organization,the content of rules-in-use is unstable,and the frequency of collective choice rules is high.In the aspect of governance rules implementation,flooding irrigation self-governance organization uses social network to transfer and exchange the information on rules-in-use and social norms,so as to realize the intervention of the two governance rules on farmers’ behavior.While collective drip irrigation self-governance organization uses democratic consultation meeting to transfer and exchange the information on demand change for rules-in-use,so as to realize the impact of collective choice rules implementation on farmers’ behaviors and performance.(3)The social networks have different effects on illegal irrigation water extraction,and the effects of different social networks types(an irrigation-member network,a kinship network and a linking network)on illegal irrigation water extraction probability and frequency are different.Specifically,the irrigation-member network size decreases illegal irrigation water extraction probability but increases illegal irrigation water extraction frequency for potential thieves,the kinship network size increases illegal irrigation water extraction probability but insignificantly affect illegal irrigation water extraction frequency,and the connection with linking networks insignificantly affect illegal irrigation water extraction probability but increases illegal irrigation water extraction frequency for potential thieves.(4)The transaction costs in governance rules implementation significantly affect farmers’ irrigation behavior.Specifically,transaction costs related to irrigator employment/demission,checking outcomes and resolving confliction significantly increase the likelihood that farmers stop making use of collective irrigation systems.(5)collective drip irrigation has a better performance of fertilizer-reducing and land-productivity-improving than flooding irrigation at the individual plot level.On the average,collective drip irrigation reduces fertilizer use intensity by 12.32%,and improves land productivity by 46.47%.At the individual plot level,72.08% of the total number of the collective drip irrigation plots reduces fertilizer use intensity and improved land productivity.(6)Compared with flooding irrigation,the frequency of collective choice rules implementation on fertigation,significantly increases the probability that collective drip irrigation reduces fertilizer use intensity and increase land productivity.Based on the above research conclusions and discussions,under the background of comprehensively promoting rural revitalization and accelerating agricultural and rural modernization,we put forward the overall policy suggestions from two aspects of promoting green agriculture development and modernization of grass-roots governance.The main policy suggestions are as follows.(1)In terms of promoting green agriculture development,the government should continue to promote drip irrigation technology,provide necessary convenience for knowledge pervasion and service support activities of drip irrigation technology,increase investment in general education of collective drip irrigation technology for farmers,support the R & D and application of visualization and intelligent in collective drip irrigation technology,develop and strengthen the service organizations of collective drip irrigation technology,and encourage specialized agricultural service involve in the use link of collective drip irrigation technology.(2)In terms of strengthening the modernization of grass-roots governance,we should strengthen grass-roots irrigation governance,focus on breaking through the bottleneck of low-cost supervision of violations,promote the innovation of low-cost supervision mechanism and low-cost information disclosure mechanism,enhance the deterrence of formal punishment mechanism,deepen the reform of multi-level punishment system,and adhere to and increase the implementation of the system.