Can Locally Developed Institutions Promote the Management of Farmer Led Irrigation Development? Lessons from Nyando Sub County, Western Kenya

Institutions are considered crucial for any irrigation enterprise to thrive, this is because they enable ordered thought and provide a framework for how irrigation will be carried out. The past decade has shown an intensification in irrigation development in Kenya with the government seeking to expand the area under irrigation. However, this expansion is expected to take place in the mainstream irrigation forms recognized by the government. Farmer Led Irrigation Development (FLID) is an alternative form of irrigation that is growing significantly and is already contributing to the area under irrigation and yet remains unacknowledged by policymakers. In FLID, farmers oversee their irrigation enterprise making decisions on the how, the what, the where, and the when. Its growth is spontaneous and to a larger extent seems unplanned. There is a lack of understanding of the institutions within which FLID operates and how the use of water and the attendant infrastructure is managed. In this paper, the theory of institutional bricolage is adopted to analyze whether locally developed institutions can promote the management of FLID. Using household interviews, KIIs, and FGDs data, the study identifies the institutions operating in the study area, their functions, and how farmers have adapted to the vacuum left by these institutions. The study finds that despite the existence of irrigation schemes in the area that have formal structures in place, their scope does not cover FLID and farmers have thus been forced to come up with their institutions in a patchwork of the old and new. These have been formed through institutional bricolage, which shapes and reshapes both bureaucratic and socially embedded institutions to develop hybrid institutions. The study concludes that there are different categories of institutions in the area; bureaucratic which have failed to acknowledge FLID, socially embedded in which the farmers are involved daily, and hybrid institutions which is a combination of both