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Self-Governance and the Effects of Rules in Irrigation Systems: Evidence from Laboratory and Framed Field Experiments in China, India and Vietnam

This paper employs laboratory and framed field experiments to investigate factors influencing the behavior of irrigation users, with an emphasis on the effects of exogenously and endogenously designed allocation rules. The experiments were conducted with 36 groups of farmers and students from China, India and Vietnam. The results show that physically asymmetric access to water as a resource creates an asymmetric distribution of investments, harvests and revenues that favors upstream users. Exogenously designed allocation rules appear able to equalize the distribution of revenue between upstream and downstream users, but are also likely to reduce the volume of investment and generated revenue. Meanwhile, communication between irrigation users with the possibility of endogenously designed rules appears to have a stronger equalizing effect on asymmetric resource access but also increases overall investment, which then increases water availability in a hypothetical irrigation channel. This suggests that promoting participation of irrigation users in designing rules for water distribution, water use monitoring and sanctioning might improve the performance of irrigation systems.