Abstract
Digital irrigation technologies — soil-moisture sensors, smart water meters, remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS), decision-support systems, telemetry, automated drip systems, and water-accounting platforms — are conventionally justified by the volume of water they are projected to save. This criterion is economically insufficient because higher field-level technical efficiency does not automatically translate into farm profitability, lower governance costs, or reduced basin-level depletion. The article develops a methodological framework for the economic appraisal of digital irrigation under the data and institutional constraints characteristic of transition economies, with Kazakhstan as the contextual case. The study is conceptual-methodological in design, grounded in a structured synthesis of peer-reviewed economic literature and contextual interpretation of national irrigation-modernization materials, and does not produce empirical estimates. The framework comprises four components: a taxonomy distinguishing technical, economic, accounting, and conservation notions of efficiency and value; a three-level appraisal structure separating farm-level private profitability, irrigation-system accounting and governance value, and basin-level social conservation value; a data-availability tier system linking each appraisal method to the data it actually requires; and a method-selection matrix connecting technology class, water-management function, minimum data tier, recommended method, institutional precondition, and dominant appraisal risk, with explicit safeguards against the most common evaluation errors. In practical terms, the architecture can guide farm survey design, subsidy targeting, and investment prioritization before costly data collection begins. The framework's limitation follows from its design: it organizes future empirical work rather than generating causal or quantified findings.