Comparison of Irrigation Management in Water User Associations of Italy, Spain and Turkey Using Benchmarking Techniques

This study analyses the collective management of irrigation water in 42 WUAs operating in agricultural regions of Italy, Spain and Turkey. The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Agglomerative Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (AHCA) are used for benchmarking the technical and financial performance of the WUAs. The analysis shows that the Spanish WUAs, which have less staff (-90%) and higher revenue collection (-53%), perform better than the WUAs of the other two countries. PCA and AHCA indicate that the technical and financial performance of the Turkish and some Spanish WUAs are similar. The Italian and Turkish associations have very large irrigation areas, and WUAs, which may be one of the reasons for the poor management in some organization areas of these countries. Specifically, Italy has excessive Management, Operation and Maintenance costs (up to 1500 is an element of/ha-yr) and large staff numbers (5 persons per 100 ha of irrigated area), while Turkey has high water waste (up to 15000 m(3)/ha-yr) and insufficient revenue collection (about 60%). Based on the benchmarking results, recommendations are made, to improve the water use and financial performance of the Italian and Turkish WUAs.