Cultivating success and failure in policy: participatory irrigation management in Nepal

Introduced over a decade ago and considered largely successful by irrigation professionals, Irrigation Management Transfer and Participatory Irrigation Management (IMT/PIM) policies were recently reviewed and seen to have resulted in more cases of failure than success. Primary research on two IMT/PIM projects in Nepal, which were among the few successes in the assessment supporting a failed PIM, shows how such policy-driven evaluations, when defining success, overlook incongruities between policies, institutions, and the evolving dynamics around class, caste, ethnicity, and gender. Without exploring the dynamics of practice, the process of cultivating success and/or failure in evaluations provides little insight on how irrigation management works on the ground.