Putting Policy into Practice: Supporting Irrigation Sector Reforms in Kyrgyzstan
It was a big moment in December 2021 when the National Assembly of Kyrgyzstan endorsed a package of legal reforms to make local irrigation more sustainable. Big, because the reforms had not been initiated by the parliament or by influential business groups, as would have typically happened. Instead, the reform was the result of a long, bottom-up struggle, kicked off by a small group of farmers, irrigation specialists and municipal representatives from the country’s Southern provinces.
Having suffered for years from decreasing crop yields due to shortages in irrigation water reaching their barley, wheat or watermelon fields, they initiated what would become one of Kyrgyzstan’s first successful grassroots campaigns. They were united by the belief that local irrigation — an essential service for thousands of farming households across the country — did not work properly, and that reforms were needed if farmers were to make a living both now and in the future.
Water User Associations (WUAs) had been in charge of local irrigation for nearly 20 years following sector reforms initiated by the World Bank. However, most WUAs had become severely indebted over the years and were no longer capable of regularly delivering irrigation water or maintaining all the canals, gates and ditches. Concerned by these developments, several farmers and municipal representatives gathered in spring 2018 in the city of Osh to discuss what to do. With the support of Helvetas, who had already been providing technical support for improving local irrigation for many years, they teamed up with legal and policy experts from the capital and started drafting their own advocacy strategy. Their ambitious goal: Reform the National Water Code so that municipal authorities could assume responsibility for local irrigation from their local WUA and invest public funds in maintenance and service delivery (which was prohibited by existing law).
Joint advocacy brings concrete results
It took some time for the group to agree on a shared understanding of the problem, define a joint proposal to policy makers on how the problem should be solved, and to draft a concrete campaign plan. But once they did, they started to sensitize others — first friends and colleagues, then neighboring villages through meetings and workshops at the provincial level, and finally through exchanges with federal departments and elected policy makers.
A key moment was when local farmers and municipal representatives welcomed national parliamentarians to their villages, demonstrating the problems of local irrigation firsthand and discussing possible solutions with them. Step by step, the group managed to build momentum, to bring more people on board, and to influence regional and national media to report on the problem and the possible way forward. Although COVID-19 and political unrest slowed down political dialogue throughout 2020, the group managed to carry on and eventually convinced parliamentarians to endorse the proposed legal package. “This was my first time seeing advocacy activities produce results,” says Chinara Jusupova, a local councillor and activist who had been with the campaign from the very beginning.
It was a tremendous success, achieved despite the odds. Many sector experts initially doubted that the initiative would ever succeed, since resistance from key actors against all sorts of progressive reforms simply looked too big to overcome. At the same time, many farmers were not confident they would be able to change national law, as Kyrgyz politics are characterised by top-down rather than bottom-up policy making. “To be honest, I didn't believe at first (...) that something could change. I had experienced too many such meetings without anything happening afterwards,” says Zhoodar Nurmamatov, a farmer who joined the initiative at an early stage.
The journey continues
Even with the legal reforms, the journey to lasting irrigation solutions was far from over. Parliaments across the globe regularly endorse new laws and regulations, but often fail to allocate the budget required for promoting and explaining these changes to those most affected by them.
In this case, the legal changes mainly affected local municipalities and WUAs, as they had to renegotiate their roles and responsibilities regarding local irrigation. With the new legal framework, municipal authorities now have the right to assume full responsibility over irrigation service delivery and infrastructure maintenance, but can assign the local WUA with these tasks if they want. This requires lots of legal procedures, including the transfer of property and negotiating service agreements. In addition, the new setup allows municipalities to support local irrigation with public funds — something that was previously prohibited when WUAs were in charge. To access necessary funds, municipalities can also tap into external funding from provincial development funds or donor agencies; this is something not everyone has experience with.
Hence, Helvetas decided to carry on beyond the successful legal reform and continue supporting rural municipalities in understanding and implementing the new legal framework. From 2022 onwards, and with continued financial support from the Foundation for the Third Millennium, a new project called Turning Irrigation Reforms Into Practice (TIRIP) set out to work with 27 pilot municipalities in three provinces. In addition to longstanding partner municipalities from Osh and Jalal-Abad province in the South, the project onboarded additional municipalities from the Northern Issyk-Kul province.
Supported by the Kyrgyz partner NGO Bio KG and in close coordination with the regional offices of the Kyrgyz State Water Department and the National Agency on State Service and Local Self-Governance, TIRIP is pursuing three key objectives: First, raising awareness at the local, district and provincial levels for the new legal framework and the opportunities it offers; second, implementing the new setup in the 27 pilot municipalities; and third, continuing policy dialogue at the national level to ensure continued support and to pave the way for further reforms.
New challenges, promising results
As with the advocacy campaign a few years before, supporting implementation was no easy task and was met with two major obstacles. In 2024 the Kyrgyz government kicked off a National Administrative Territorial Reform that led to a complete reorganization of local boundaries and the forced merger of most municipalities. Consequently, most of the project’s pilot municipalities suddenly grew in terms of territory and number of inhabitants, which did not ease the project’s task.
At the same time, the national tier of the State Water Department, who had initially supported the reform and the project’s work, began to question the localization approach. Instead, they began promoting a fully centralized system that would control all funds and exert full power over local irrigation across the country, down to the smallest earth ditch. Obviously, not everyone within the state administration agreed with this, especially not at the regional and local levels, where people in charge started to see the many advantages of a more localized system and already knew about the central state’s limitations.
Despite these challenges, TIRIP has achieved impressive results so far. Thanks to the project’s tailored support, most pilot municipalities completed the transfer of assets such as canals and gates from WUAs into municipal ownership. “TIRIP helped us understand our roles and responsibilities in a manner that we could also explain to the farmers — this was very important,” says a municipal representative from Bazar Korgon district in Southern Kyrgyzstan.
In parallel, and thanks to specific trainings provided by Helvetas and Bio KG, many municipalities managed to raise new, additional funding for infrastructure repair. And while many WUAs had struggled to collect user fees from farmers, the collection rate significantly improved in most places, sometimes from below 40% to above 90%. Some municipalities even introduced cashless payment for irrigation, making the collection of fees much easier and more transparent for everyone. Consequently, many municipalities could start to repay the debts that their local WUA had piled up in the past and to cover the maintenance and operational costs of local irrigation.
Thus, farmers, municipalities, Helvetas and its implementing partners are back where it all began — working at the very practical, local level to ensure that people know their rights, roles and responsibilities and can make informed, collaborative decisions about their community’s future.
