Karya Mandiri Irrigation System: A Case of Long-enduring Irrigation Management Institutions in West Sumatra, Indonesia

Abstract

"Karya Mandiri Irrigation System (KMIS) is a community-managed irrigation system that has shown its institutional endurance in passing through management environment changes such as irrigation policy, institutional, economic and technological aspects. Local community has crafted irrigation institutions that enabled them to adapt to the pressures and changes, made necessary investments and performing various management functions. This has made the system continue to exist as a self organizing irrigation system and serve the farmers while many have not successful in responding to the changes.

"The KMIS case is an interesting case to assess the applicability of design principles proposed by Ostrom (1992) which consists of: well-defined resource and user group boundaries; congruence between appropriation and provision rules of resource governance; ability of the user group to modify rules; monitoring, sanctioning and conflict resolution mechanisms; political autonomy and nested enterprises for larger system. This paper attempted to identify the commonalities and differences of institutional design principles adopted by the community with those of proposed by Ostrom (1992). In addition to those eight principles the stakeholders at KMIS have moved further to developed social entrepreneurship principle/orientation which tend to be one of the key factor for the sustainability of irrigation institutions."