Challenges with property rights for improving access to water

Recent water debates have focused on personal and domestic use, but water used for agriculture gets less attention. Projects to improve access to water for agriculture often fail to consider property rights issues. This can undermine land tenure security, contribute to the loss of resources and create conflict.

Rain-fed farming and pastoralism are the main forms of agriculture in Sahelian countries. In the past few decades, there have been efforts to improve the water infrastructure in rural areas – for example through the creation of new water points and irrigation schemes.

Research from the International Institute for Environment and Development, UK, explored land and water rights issues for water projects in the Sahel. The research focused on irrigation schemes and pastoral water points in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Senegal, as well as projects to improve wetlands management.

Land and water rights are closely linked in irrigation schemes. Many farmers have insecure land use rights and these have several conditions attached. For example, if farmers do not pay water fees they are evicted from the land. This creates incentives for farmers to pay fees, which is good for the viability of a scheme. But during bad harvests, it may mean that farmers lose land they have cultivated for generations without receiving compensation. Farmers need fee-payment mechanisms that cater for harvest fluctuations, such as rescheduling payments in bad years, or enabling them to rent out land.

Key research findings include:

• New irrigation schemes usually suppress existing land rights and reallocate land and water rights. New users may or may not be the original rights holders. New schemes require mechanisms that prevent local elites from using irrigation projects to strengthen their land claims to the detriment of others.
• In pastoral systems, people who control water points can regulate access to surrounding grazing lands. New public water points have often attracted increasing numbers of herders and undermined the land and water use rights of local communities.
• Digging private pastoral wells, or taking over public ones, is used by local elites as a strategy to grab common resources and secure exclusive land and water use rights.
• Wetlands create tension between competing users and management authorities. They are also a focus of resource and revenue grabbing by powerful elites, such as customary chiefs.

Water and land laws have evolved with little coordination and, in some respects, in different directions. Furthermore, recent laws on administrative decentralisation may contradict land and water laws. There is still a significant gap between government legislation and local practice, despite government efforts to regulate resource access and management in publicly funded water infrastructure schemes.

Property rights issues must be taken seriously in programmes to increase water security. Solutions must fit with current legislation and be acceptable to local users. Considering this, practitioners and policymakers must:

• consult local users when designing and implementing water programmes
• act on the basis of a solid understanding of local resource tenure systems
• consider land tenure issues in decisions concerning the provision of water infrastructure
• give smallholders new land and water rights options that offer greater tenure security
• ensure harmonious coordination between laws governing land and water rights, and between these laws and legislation on decentralisation.

Source(s):
‘Land and water rights in the Sahel: Tenure challenges of improving access to water for agriculture’, International Institute for Environment and Development Drylands Issues Paper 139, IIED: London, edited by Lorenzo Cotula, 2006 (PDF) Full document.

Funded by: Food and Agriculture Organisation; Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency

id21 Research Highlight: 8 September 2006

Further Information:
Lorenzo Cotula
International Institute for Environment and Development
3 Endsleigh Street
London, WC1H 0DD
UK

Tel: +44 (0)20 7388 2117
Fax: +44 (0)20 7388 2826
Contact the contributor: Lorenzo.cotula@iied.org

International Institute for Environment and Development, UK

Other related links:
'Land rights in Africa: protecting the interests of vulnerable groups'

'Africa’s changing landscape: new policies to resolve conflicts over land'

'Water access in Ethiopia – can conflict be avoided?'

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