Participatory Irrigation Management and Transfer: Setting the Guiding Principles for a Sustaining Monitoring & Evaluation System - a Focus on the Mediterranean

A major shortcoming of Participatory Irrigation Management and Irrigation Management Transfer (PIM/IMT) is the absence of Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) systems that accompany these processes and become a major instrument to correct, improve and learn. Although at the global level some countries have exerted efforts to implement M&E systems, these still present limitations, as the review of the international experiences shows. The Mediterranean situation is even more dramatic since only Tunisia implements an M&E system, whereas Egypt has shyly moved in this direction with a limited practical application. This state of affairs led the authors to develop a set of guiding principles to develop an M&E system to be applied in countries where PIM/IMT is adopted. This paper revises the main international efforts devoted to assess the performance of PIM/IMT and the state of the art of these processes in Southern and Eastern Mediterranean Countries. Moreover, it sets the framework and analyses the main sustaining factors for the development of a new M&E system for these countries.