Userism as a Management Type

We may broadly classify management relationships into three kinds: the first is public management such as the irrigation department. The second is private management such as the Continental Corporation which produces Sparkletts mineral water. A third type of management is neither public nor private in the usual sense. We may call this a users' entity, such as a water user association. To describe this type of entity, we may use the term, "user-ism". You will not find this word in any dictionary; it was coined by Mr. Asif Kazi, Special Secretary in Pakistanís Ministry of Water and Power. We have adopted the term because it captures in one word the process of transferring management from the public sector to organizations of users.

Among these three basic types of management, as applied to irrigation systems, the most rare type is private management. This is mainly because irrigation water is a social good involving large numbers of small farmers, and it is very difficult for a commercial company to manage it with profit. This type of management is clearly not a general option for the irrigation sector.

What about management by the public sector? While this is the most common type of management that we see today, in most cases public management has low efficiency and requires substantial subsidies. Experience from many sectors, including irrigation, tells us that it is almost impossible to bring public management into high levels of efficiency. Certainly it is possible to improve the management of public irrigation systems, but it is an uphill battle. The interests of the public managers are unlikely to coincide with the interests of the actual users.

The remaining management option is management by users, or participatory irrigation management (PIM). Under this situation, the managers have a direct incentive to manage the irrigation system efficiently because they are themselves users or are directly accountable to the users. This is the logic of userism: we can ensure a coincidence of interests between managers and users because the users are themselves the managers.

- Peter Sun