This study challenges the prevailing institutional approach to water users associations (WUAs) in China by examining diverse organizational modalities of irrigation management in GC town in the southern part of Shandong province. GC town is a lead grain-producing township that grows wheat and rice across seasons with conjunctive use of surface water and groundwater. The surge of well irrigation, driven by agricultural mechanization, state-backed projects and climate change, has diminished its collective action on irrigation commons. Contrary to top-down institutional planning, this study reveals three distinct models of grassroots irrigation management in three villages, respectively: bureaucratic, self-governing and self-dependent. In YHM village, the ownership and management of government-funded electromechanical wells were converted from the WUAs to the Water Station office under political imperatives. This bureaucratic approach, prevalent in the township, relies on government staff for water fee collection and infrastructure maintenance. XF village, with insufficient surface water in the downstream, has independently built private wells that are managed by local plumbers for the convenience of mechanized irrigation, demonstrating a self-governing model. MW village, without government support, exhibits a self-dependent model, where villagers use various strategies to navigate water access in a less organized way, including private tubewell construction and pump irrigation using their diesel engines. The findings challenge neo-institutional policy prescriptions on cooperation alien from rural society, revealing a complex interplay of traditional and modern, formal and informal, and governmental and folk practices that sustain agricultural production and irrigation management. This context-sensitive analysis underscores the importance of understanding local dynamics in grassroots irrigation management in rural China.
