Investigating Institutional Constraints to Groundwater Resources Management in Rural Areas of Lorestan Province Using the Qualitative Research Method

A spectacular increase in groundwater use for irrigation has taken place during the last half-century in most arid and semiarid countries especially Iran. Iran is currently among the top groundwater miners in the world. In fact, if the prevailing anarchy continues, serious problems may appear in the long term and the situation could become more tragic in the near future. While there are several reasons for the underlying groundwater crisis in the country, one of the most important challenges facing the country can be due to the institutional constraints by stakeholders involved in groundwater resources management. Thus, this study describes institutional constraints to groundwater resource management using Strauss and Corbin’s approach. Participants were 16 key informants involved in the groundwater resources management in Roumeshkan township. To select the samples, snowball sampling method was used. Thus, participants were interviewed in-depth and interviews were recorded and transcribed for qualitative analysis by Strauss and Corbin’s Grounded Theory. In the present study, encoding the collected data in different ways resulted in the extraction of 144 concepts and 41 sub-categories. Based on the paradigm model, the core category identified in this research was “mismanagement of groundwater resources” which was found to be related to other categories of meaning.