Democratic Functioning of the Water Collectives and Going the Extra Mile: A Case of Water Users Associations in West Bengal, India

ABSTRACT Upholding the democratic governance of functioning in water collectives has always remained a challenge. Democratic governance involves egalitarian decision‐making, a participatory election process, equitable handling of defaulters, management of conflicts, and maintaining transparency, among others. In this paper, we do a comparative analysis of functioning and non‐functioning (at the time of the survey) water user associations (WUAs) promoted by the West Bengal government. We find that democratic governance is correlated with the functioning of the WUAs, suggesting its association with core service delivery. Also, the democratic nature of governance is reflected in members' collective faith when asked about the sustainability of their associations in the future after the withdrawal of government support. We have undertaken case studies of better‐performing WUAs to assess their best practices and mapped them to Ostrom's principles. We also find that some of these WUAs, while managing natural resources, have also acted as public institutions by providing support to members and non‐members alike during the pandemic. The paper concludes that practitioners and promoters should focus on collectives' sustainability through continuous monitoring and ensuring good‐quality core service delivery. Well‐run collectives should also look beyond their core responsibilities to emerge as salient public institutions.