Abstract: Irrigation investments are crucial for sustainable development and shared prosperity. This study offers a comprehensive overview of the design and impacts of 21st-century irrigation development efforts in low- and middle-income countries. We systematically review both irrigation investments from development institutions and impact evaluation studies of irrigation infrastructure interventions from 2000 to 2022. First, from a dataset of ~5.7 million project-level records, we identified 2,480 projects with US$$110 billion in irrigation-specific investments. Second, the 104 studies reviewed predominantly focus on economic outcomes, such as productivity and income, often derived from agricultural household surveys. These studies exhibit diverse characteristics, including outcome measures, units of observation, time frames, and methodological approaches, underscoring heterogeneity in the causal evidence base. However, rigorous empirical analyses of irrigation’s broader impacts across spatial and temporal scales remain scarce. Addressing these gaps is essential for promoting sustainable irrigation, thus requiring stronger and sustained collaboration among scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.

Abstract: The intersection of environmental change, governance, and finance shapes complex social-ecological systems critical for global development. These systems face increasing disruptions, such as natural disasters, pandemics, and political conflicts, necessitating proactive management and governance strategies. This study employs social network theory to analyze the dynamics of irrigation organizations in Bolivia, focusing on the implications of irrigation development interventions. By integrating real network data with theoretical frameworks, we assess changes in network structure and their effects on sustainable development. Our analysis highlights the vulnerability of marginalized groups, including indigenous peoples and subsistence farmers, to large exogenous shocks, such as pandemics, and emphasizes the need for resilient and adaptive strategies. Through innovative methodologies and empirical insights, this interdisciplinary research offers actionable recommendations to enhance the sustainability of economic development interventions and support global development efforts. Specifically, we conduct an ex-ante evaluation to study how the implementation of a globally funded agricultural digital extension services program, as a complement to existing irrigation interventions, enhances local-level robustness and fosters resilience and adaptation.

Abstract: We study the local economic effects of public investments in community-based irrigation systems in Bolivia over the period 2000–2022. Using a new village-level panel linking multiple sources of administrative data with satellite-based indicators of economic activity, we estimate dynamic treatment effects via a staggered difference-in-differences approach, leveraging variation in completion dates across irrigation projects. Nighttime lights, our proxy for local economic activity, decline in the short run before returning to counterfactual levels after roughly five years. This pattern is consistent with smallholder farmers reallocating resources toward private on-farm investments needed to benefit from the communal infrastructure in settings with limited liquidity and credit access. The results contribute new evidence on the dynamic adjustment process following participatory irrigation development, highlighting the value and limits of integrating administrative and geospatial data for infrastructure evaluation in developing countries.

Abstract: In data-scarce settings, measuring key agricultural outcomes across time and space remains a central constraint for policy design, investment targeting, and impact evaluation. I develop a scalable remote sensing framework that infers smallholder plot-level cropping intensity from satellite imagery and use it to evaluate the impacts of public investments in community-based irrigation systems in Bolivia over 2000–2022, leveraging variation in project-level completion dates in a staggered difference-in-differences design. Cropping intensity rises by approximately 0.4 units roughly five years after treatment exposure, implying greater agricultural intensification in treated plots. This paper demonstrates the potential of integrating high-resolution administrative records with satellite imagery for studying agricultural interventions in developing countries and calls on governments and donors to prioritize building these linkages by fostering institutional access to administrative data and co-production with researchers to improve the credibility, transparency, and impact of public investments.

Abstract: We evaluate the impact of Bolivia’s National Irrigation Program with a Watershed Approach (PRONAREC), a participatory irrigation infrastructure development initiative targeting smallholder farmers. The program finances small-scale communal irrigation systems, with beneficiaries directly involved throughout the project cycle, from design to governance. To fully benefit from the irrigation systems, farmers are required to make private on-farm investments to connect their agricultural plots and adopt complementary technologies and practices. Using two rounds of cross-sectional agricultural household surveys (2015, n=1,482; 2022, n=450) and administrative records, we exploit the program’s phased rollout to compare early beneficiaries to those awaiting implementation. Our empirical strategy combines propensity score analysis with a selection-corrected stochastic frontier model to control for selection bias from observable and unobservable characteristics. Results show increased irrigation adoption and coverage, more widespread use of improved seeds, higher investments in agricultural inputs, and greater market engagement. However, farmers remain technically inefficient, operating below their production potential. We find no short-term effects on food security or poverty. These findings suggest that public investments in participatory irrigation catalyze agricultural transformation by triggering private investment, modern technology adoption, and a virtuous cycle of innovation.