A guideline for sustainable irrigation water management: a case of a developing country

ABSTRACT Irrigation Water Management (IWM) being considered essential as it contributes to crop production all over the world. Nonetheless, water losses throughout the system, inefficient irrigation practices and lack of attention towards the proper maintenance of existing infrastructure were the constraining factors to achieve the benefits of sustainable use of water. Hence, this paper develops strategies to achieve sustainable water management of irrigation systems. Sixteen semi-structured interviews were conducted for industry professionals in the IWM sector in Sri Lanka as the main data collection method in this study. The collected data were analysed using a code-based content analysis based on the directed approach. The research findings identified four main categories of strategies, namely, engineering, management, operational and regulatory. The findings are substantially beneficial for industry practitioners in the water management sector to overcome the issues in IWM practices regarding the water use efficiency, equity of water distribution, environmental integrity and economic acceptability. This study can be further extended to prioritise the issues and strategies to statistically generalise the findings.