| During the 1950 s to 1970 s,the United States and other foreign countries and Taiwan area has started the reform of management of participation in irrigation,in this process,the irrigation management responsibilities originally completely belonged to government departments is transformed to water user association.After participation,farmers could affect irrigation management at any time to improve the management level of irrigation systems.In the face of various widespread problems which many big irrigation area have,such as the pay rate of water is low,management system is not smooth,the management main body of the engineering of end canal system is absent and so on,China started "participatory irrigation management(PIM)" in the mid of 1990 s,establishing different forms of water user association(WUA)in many parts.Water user association is the important organization form to improve the use efficiency of agricultural irrigation water,but now there are more than two thirds of water user association could not operate normally and the current practice is that the participation enthusiasm and degree of farmers is low.Therefore,the analysis of influence factors of farmers’ willingness to participate in water user association and the study of incentive countermeasures guiding farmers to participate actively become the key of our country to explore the management mode of social water conservancy project and to improve the efficiency of agricultural irrigation water.Based on the general theory of collective action and the theory of incentive and applying the Hierarchical Linear Model at both the village and famer levels,this study researches famers’ willingness to participate in the Water User Association in Baojixia Irrigation Area of Shaanxi and its incentive countermeasures.The survey showed that the willingness of sample farmers to participate in the water user association is not high,with only 51.98% of them expressing participation willingness.The estimation results of Null model show that both village and farmer levels are important reasons.From the estimation results of Random Intercept Model we can see that in the village level,village type,the total number of wells and the existence of chaanel maintenance problems have significant influences on farmers’ participation intention.In the famer level,the agricultural risk attitude of farmers,the equity degree of irrigation water allocation,the price perception degree of irrigation water,and the perception of the shortage of irrigation water’ affect,social trust,social prestige and social participation have significant influences on famers’ participation willingness.According to the empirical analysis,combined with the guidance of government policy and domestic and foreign research literature,this paper constructes comprehensive incentive contermeasures which the internal incentive factors are key factors to influence farmers’ participation willingness and the external motivating factors’ includes government policies.The main conclusions are:(1)Although there founded a certain amount of water user association in Baojixia Irrigation Area,many of them is just built under the pressure of the superior drive and eventually became a mere formality,few of them really play roles.(2)In the research area,the sense of farmers’ participation in water user association was weak,and the participation willingness was not high.Only 51.98% of the farmers surveyed expressed their willingness to participate,and there was still a lot of room for improvement.(3)The empirical results show that about 13.2% of the differences of the willingness of farmers’ participation are derived from the differences between villages,and the role of village characteristics in the participation of farmers cannot be ignored.(4)From the farmer factors,each dimension of two core variables of psychological cognition and social capital has significant positive impact on farmers’ willingness to participate in water user association besides social network,and the psychological cognition and social capital are important intrinsic motivation factors which must be considered when designing the incentive contermeasures.(5)The government should be inclined in the formulation of policies and provide support from the financial and legal aspects,so as to create a favorable external environment for the long-term operation and sustainable run of the water user association. |
