Assessing Adaptive Capacity of the Iranian Water Laws to Environmental Changes

Water resources systems are constantly changing in all their natural and socio-economic dimensions. So, instead of managing based on predicting the probabilities of various events in the future, inevitably, arrangements must be made for facing the possibility of various phenomena occurring in the future. Therefore, the only option is to base the management of water resources systems on a mechanism for understanding the changes and adapting to them. This type of management, which is based on adaptation to change, is known as adaptive management. One of the main features of an adaptive structure is its institutional adaptive capacity. Therefore, in this article, the adaptive capacity of the Iranian water laws, as part of the formal water institution, will be examined. The evaluation framework used in this research was the adaptive capacity wheel. All water laws of Iran have been analyzed in five legal epochs, including the modern customary epoch, the epoch of private law, the epoch of public law, the epoch of governmentalization of water law, and the epoch of tolerance leading to crisis. For this purpose, the method of qualitative content analysis with quantitative scoring has been used. The results showed that the adaptive capacity of the water laws in each epoch has a relatively negative effect, that is, in the laws of those epochs to deal with the negative effects of the new conditions and adapt to them, there are many gaps that need to be fixed.