Assessing the Water Governance System for Groundwater Conservation in Iran

With no doubt, conservation of groundwater resources is a contested process which demands for getting involved with social and political dimensions, rather than a single technical action. Thus, desirable state of the water governance can facilitate implementation of the groundwater conservation process, because governance system implies for a regulating structure of management processes such as water resource conservation. Presenting a framework for the assessment of the governance process based on the Contextual Interaction Theory, this paper aims to analyze and discuss the structural causes of failure in the groundwater conservation policies in Iran. In the framework, we assessed five elements of a governance system from the perspective of two general criteria of extent and coherence. These five elements are scales and levels, actors and networks, problem perspectives and goal ambitions, strategies and instruments, and finally the resources (financial, human, …). Different sources of data are used in this research, including national documents, interviews and questionnaire. Semi-structured interviews are done with elites in Ministry of Energy, Ministry of Jahad-Agriculture, Department of Environment, and Management and Planning Organization. To gather the Parliament Members’ opinions, a semi-structured questionnaire is used. The assessment results showed that not only the governance system suffers from the lack of comprehensiveness and development (extent) in all of the five governance elements, but also the relatedness and coordination (coherence) of the elements are in poor conditions for all five. This situation indicated that the current system of water governance has a poor capacity to support implementation of the conservation policies and therefore the main target for enhancing sustainability in the groundwater resources should shift towards amendment and improvement of the water governance structure