Evaluating effective criteria in prioritizing a number of irrigation and drainage networks of Karkhe watershed for water allocation

The scarcity of water resources and the inequitable distribution of soil and water resources in the irrigated area is a substantial challenge in the most agricultural areas of Iran, particularly the Karkhe watershed, resulting in competition among water consumers. Therefore, it is important to prioritize water allocation in agriculture. At the other side, due to the complicated relations between several criteria and sub-criteria which are conflicting sometimes, using conventional decision-making methods cannot be applicable. This paper aims at employing fuzzy DEMATEL method to identify the relations between effective criteria in allocating water in order to prioritize a number of irrigation networks of Karkhe River. In this way, 30 criteria were determined in social, economic and environmental sections. The results show that the criteria of participation of stakeholders, water user cooperation quota along with climate change criterion are being determined and prioritized as effective and important criteria by the values of 6.9, 6.73 and 6.44, respectively, while the criteria of immigration, regional employment rate, social justice and social welfare resulting from water, are considered as impressible criteria affected strongly by the aforementioned effective criteria by the values of 6.09, 5.93, 5.72 and 5.1, respectively. Therefore, applying fuzzy DEMATEL, the network relations between criteria and their importance are determined for water allocation between irrigation and drainage networks of Karkhe river in order to prioritize them using multi criteria decision making method.