Performance assessment of collective irrigation in Water Users’ Associations of Calabria (Southern Italy)

In order to identify the weakness factors of the collective irrigation service, the system operation and financial performance of seven Water Users' Associations (WUAs) in Calabria was quantitatively evaluated by a limited set of indicators and compared by common benchmarking techniques. In relation to the surveyed system operation indicators, the investigation highlighted a satisfactory fulfilment of crop water demand, but a very low efficiency in exploiting the available irrigation water in all the investigated WUAs. Concerning the financial aspects of the irrigation service, the results indicated a very low degree of financial self‐sufficiency of the WUAs, a high variability of management, operation and maintenance costs and personnel requirements referred to the irrigated area unit and a very wide range of average water price per hectare. The application of principal component analysis provided three derivative indicators, measuring the operative and economic performance of the WUAs. The clustering algorithms and calculation of the quality index showed respectively similarities among the irrigation service performance of the investigated WUAs and allowed the ranking of these collective agencies.