Over the last few decades, state agencies, development organisations and private sector agencies have focused efforts not only on developing physical irrigation infrastructure but also on establishing effective management mechanisms. The empirical data compiled in this paper identifies the everyday issues of irrigation water governance at local level, particularly coordination between actors, water allocation within and between schemes, farmer participation, project evaluation and planning, and the emergence of private schemes.

The study seeks to identify the factors that enable or constrain the good governance of common-pool resources in Cambodia using irrigation water as the case for analysis. It found that the decentralised natural resource management approach was not functioning, whereas local implementation of community-based natural resource management to manage irrigation water was working, though unsatisfactorily. The low performance of the latter is due to the difficulty maintaining community commitment to paying irrigation service fees, a lack of local ownership of […]

This study tries to map the current state of research in selected Cambodian universities, with special focus on research capacities – the factors that facilitate (or hinder) research, especially applied research with a direct relevance to Cambodia’s development challenges. It seeks also to identify opportunities to seed development research through modest financial support and to improve research and research capacity in universities. It aims to provide baseline data that can inform conversation on how to support public universities so that […]