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The portable scale model is brought to each of the numerous communities in the Licto-Guarguallá Irrigation System, in order to interactively discuss with the community members, particularly female farmers, their design needs and wishes, and the strategies to strengthen inter-community system design, construction and management Discussion about farmers’ optimal design and implementation strategies and rights definition are facilitated by local (female) water user leaders, in local language (quichua), in farmers’ own community, avoiding trainers’ or engineers’ offices and technicist talk and drawings During the discussions about irrigation design at community level, many new technical and organizational issues were brought to the fore by the future water users, which were incorporated in the final design and construction proposals. At the same time they got a clear and collective understanding of their future water use system Once the general system design was defined among farmers, farmer leaders and project staff, new interactive strategies and tools are used to discuss canal lay out at the hydraulic block or community level In order to come to a collective discussion about and understanding of the functioning of the irrigation system and its elements a new, de-composable (puzzle) scale model was developed, the pieces of which were to be put together by future water users in a small area representative of their community Particularly female water users, most of them illiterate and without previous experience in irrigation, could join the design exercises and see and discuss the consequences of design choices and alternatives, in their own community and in local language” Once the scale model design was put together by the farmers, water was released and all kind of positive and negative consequences of the design choices could be discussed. Role plays about water rights and water distribution developed spontaneously: the water users labeled the scale models as the ‘maquetas vivas’ , the living models
The portable scale model is brought to each of the numerous communities in the Licto-Guarguallá Irrigation System, in order to interactively discuss with the community members, particularly female farmers, their design needs and wishes, and the strategies to strengthen inter-community system design, construction and management
For queries and comments please contact
Rurgerd Boelen,
Wageningen University, the Netherlands
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
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