The development of irrigation design schools or how history structures human action

Several approaches (“schools”) of irrigation development and design have developed in the last 200 years. Three important schools developed in the context of colonies: the Dutch in the former Netherlands East Indies, the British in former British India and Africa, the French in north‐western Africa. Although circumstances for irrigation changed from colonial to post‐colonial times, irrigation design and management practices in the post‐colonial period remained largely based on colonial approaches. Engineering education is an important mechanism in this process of preference‐guided selection of design solutions. In this contribution irrigation schools are conceptualized as technological regimes, which consist of explicit and implicit rules for irrigation design. The main conclusion is that design options available to modern engineers are the product of a contextualized development and selection process within a colonial context. This does not imply that artefacts from a certain context cannot be a welcome solution for a design problem in another context. A regime conceptualization emphasizes the importance of daily practice and routines as structuring factors in technological development. Recognizing such routine‐based decision‐making processes may not immediately lead to improvements in irrigation system design, but understanding irrigation design processes is a necessary first step to take for such improvement.