At least 70 percent of today's existing area under irrigation worldwide constitutes formal irrigation schemes built by governments in the middle decades of the twentieth century; through local, national or most likely international funding. By the 80s these schemes had reached a saturation level with decaying infrastructure and a reluctance of users to contribute to their up keeping, which resulted in a downward cycle of poor water deliveries performance and the subsequent dwindling agricultural-related profits. The antecedent condition coupled with the far reaching economic crisis of the latter years of the century, gave way to a "devolution" process on the part of governments to transfer responsibility of the management of the irrigation systems to its users. Currently, more than 40 countries have undergone some kind of management transfer which has resulted in greater participation of water users in the decision making process to operate and maintain their irrigation schemes.

The objectives of a modernization programmed can be many-fold, among these, Burt and Styles (1999) suggest: improved crop yields, improved irrigation efficiency, reduce operation and maintenance (O&M) costs, improved recovery of O&M costs, improved financial sustainability, reduce conflict among project staff and water users, and reduction of environment degradation.

A careful analysis of the objectives above shows a tight correspondence with the definition of modernization given by ICID "Water application confined in time and space, enabling to meet the water requirements of a crop at a given time of its vegetative cycle or to bring the soil to the desired moisture level within the vegetative cycle. The irrigation of a field includes one or more watering per season". They reinforce the notion that modernization is a clear avenue for enhanced irrigation performance and that it is necessarily a multifunction effort cutting across disciplinary issues: irrigation engineering, agronomy, agricultural economics, social interactions and environmental protection. To achieve those objectives a combination of hardware- and software-related actions are called for; with the mix and balance between ingredients to be dictated by the particular nature of the problem at hand. Thus, there is no magic recipe that could be summarily applied, although it is to be expected that certain basic elements will always exist and will need to be taken into consideration in the modernization process.