<p>Effects of drought experience on farmers’ decisions and water management practices remains poorly understood, particularly in regions where drought is historically uncommon. This paper investigates how farmers’ decisions on sustainable water management practices are influenced by their drought experience. We reviewed the scientific literature on the factors that affect farmers’ decisions and developed a conceptual model on the relationship of drought experience with those factors and the water management practices of farmers. We then applied and refined the model based on empirical data from the Salland region in the Netherlands. Our findings indicate that drought experience affects farmer decision-making through multiple factors, particularly the internal and external adaptive capacity of farmers, as well as belief in climate change and risk perception. The effect of drought experience through these factors is explained by farmers’ former adaptation responses. Furthermore, the experience of severe or frequent droughts results in higher risk perception by farmers. Drought experience influences the implementation of sustainable water management practices with varying levels of contribution to drought resilience. We identify three future research directions to build on our findings. First, it can be tested whether maladaptation is indeed an intervening factor between drought experience and the internal and external adaptive capacity. Second, the conditions that enable structural measures to enhance drought resilience can be investigated, as none of the implemented measures seems to have succeeded in making farmers fully drought resilient. Third, adaptation pathways can be incorporated into the conceptual model to prioritise and combine multiple strategies and the role of different policy instruments in water and agricultural sectors from a long-term perspective.</p>