A Note from the ICID 2018 Conference
Participating in an international conference is a good opportunity for a PhD student to disseminate her/his research and building network for potential research collaboration in future. This is the main reason I attended the International Conference and the 65th International Executive Council (IEC) Meeting of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID) in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, from 12 to 17 August 2018.
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Opening speech by President of ICID[/caption]
With the theme of “Innovative and Sustainable Agri-Water Management: Adapting to a variable and changing climate”, the ICID 2018 International Conference brought together more than 510 delegations from forty-one countries from different backgrounds, i.e. professionals, experts, researchers, private sectors and the irrigators. This is part of collaborative effort to achieve the ICID vision, ‘water security without poverty and hunger’. In this conference. Issues on agricultural water management were covered from different perspectives and disciplines, and presented in more than 100 papers and posters.
In the second day of the conference, I presented my paper ‘Alternative institutional arrangements for sustainable irrigation in Indonesia’. This paper is part of my PhD research that was based on the study of local water user association in Southeast Sulawesi Province in Indonesia. This study was motivated by the fact that Indonesia has more than a century experience of irrigated agriculture and has spent a huge investment in irrigation development. However the performance of irrigation system in general is still below the expectation. Some scholars argued that the centralised approach of irrigation development in the past has weaken farmers’ capacity and initiative to manage and invest in the irrigation systems, which lead the irrigation systems to this day are heavily subsidised. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of local institutional arrangements and search for ways to improve the arrangements. It is argued that an appropriate institutional arrangements will provide incentives for farmers to engage in collective actions in managing the irrigation systems. This presentation won Platinum Student Award, based on the quality of extended abstract and the clarity of oral presentation.
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THe moment when I was given the Student Platinum Award for Best Presentation[/caption]
During my participation in the conference, I had the opportunity to sit in - and learn from - the Asian Working Group, in which national committees from Asian countries discussed about the state of irrigation systems in their countries, innovations, the challenges and the achievements they have achieved so far. I also met with fellow PhD student, a member of the ICID Young Professional e-forum from Africa, and other researchers from Southeast Asia, in which we discussed some challenges of doing research in developing countries, shared information on research funding from non-profit organisations, and the potential of research collaboration in the future.
At the end of the conference, there were three take home messages that I noted: 1) The need to build collaborative effort to achieve sustainable agri-water management in a changing environment; 2) The importance of holistic approach (multi-disciplines) in dealing with irrigation and drainage; and 3) The importance of effective water governance to ensure a better water management for resilient agriculture.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank the AAI On-Award Enrichment Conference Funding, and the support from the Centre for Global Food and Resources (GFAR), the University of Adelaide.