干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

Water user association(WUA) was considered as an effective means of solving water shortage problem. Famers' enthusiasms of participation in WUA were not high in inland arid regions of northwest China. The research sought factors influencing farmers' behavioural attitudes to WUA. We took the middle basin of Heihe River as study area, by all empirical investigating method with questionnaire, used the analysis of logistic regression model, to explore factors affecting farmers' behaviours toward WUA. The emperical results showed that following factors were most important for farmers to join a WUA: (1) The farmers personal characteristics such as education, being a village cadre, and health status; (2) The family factor was the decision making of planting structure; (3) The natural endowment factors were area of water right and land patch. Finally, recommendations were put forward to provide possible references for water authorities.