Irrigation organizations in South Korea consist of two types: customary and institutionalized. The latter type, named Farmland Improvement Associations (FLIAs) from 1970 until 2000, are characterized by their semi-official, bureaucratic system strongly controlled by the government, and can be regarded as the successors of those organizations that existed in the colonial period. At the end of the 1980s, South Korean peasants developed an anti-FLIA movement, refusing to pay water charges. They had suffered from a decline in the price of agricultural produce as a result of the 1980s open-market policy. In addition, they demanded the dissolution of the FLIAs as a remnant of colonial rule. Eventually, direct elections for the director and the council members were introduced and water charges were reduced drastically in 1989. The basic principle of the structural adjustment program that was executed after the financial crisis in 1997 was privatization of the public sector. The Ministry of Agriculture, however, managed to establish a gigantic nation-wide public corporation for irrigation in 2000 as a unified body of FLIAs, by taking advantage of the peasant union's opinion that the FLIAs and water charges should be abolished as a remnant of colonial rule. That opinion was regarded as legitimate and persuasive, appealing to the public sentiment of anti-colonialism, and was widely accepted by the South Korean people, so that the Ministry of Agriculture succeeded in its maneuvering. In the process, water charges were completely abolished. In the area of customary irrigation organizations, peasants conduct communal operations voluntarily for ditch maintenance. In the case of FLIAs, major ditch maintenance was conducted by FLIA staff directly, whereas small ditch maintenance was conducted by communal operations by peasants. The reduction and abolition of water charges, however, weakened peasants' incentive to participate in communal operations. FLIAs and the newly established public corporation have been forced to bear additional expenses for ditch maintenance, which are subsidized from government finances. The historical experience of Korean people when colonized by Japan has inclined them to give priority to eliminating the remnants of colonial rule. The idea of the abolition of water charges, however, is not a reasonable policy, as far as the organizational management of irrigation organizations is concerned. The public corporation started a new program to mobilize peasants. They try to organize communal groups of peasants for small ditch maintenance in order to minimize expenditure, by financially supporting such group activities.