Is Sustainability in Water Resources Management in Iran Realizable?

Basing the analyze on the index of water balance and perusing the origins of water scarcity in Iran, leads the research beyond the field of hydrology and ascribed it to the spatial distribution of population alongside the political delimitation. The socio-demographic centralized process of urbanization of the last century, particularly in Central Plateau and Salt Lake catchment, caused the unsustainable water balance and inflicted the needs and logic of homo economicus to the natural geography. Not only imposing the Rationale of accumulative-consumptionist life of human beings to that of nature, this process aroused the inequality by growth and spread of concentrated poverty. Alongside, the incompatibility of politico-hydrological delimitation, which has been sedimented through centuries, by imposing the logic of politics (and economics) to nature, disturbing the hydrological order of catchments and transporting water between catchment, problematize sustainability. The topic of sustainability, as a taken-for-granted and unquestionable resolution to the social and environmental crises, in the specific condition of Iran in recent decades, brings about the necessity of analyzing, alongside criticizing the structural and internal contradictions of sustainability per se. Concentrating on water field and applying historical-statistical analyses of water resources management in Iran, the realization of sustainability is here probed.